Local Traffic Aware Unicast Routing Scheme for Connected Car System

Connected cars are equipped with a rich set of sensors, such as GPS, accelerometer, video cameras, and pollution detectors. The information generated by these sensors can be used to offer a wide range of on-demand services, such as congestion notification, parking lots, and video surveillance. These services need a reliable and low latency unicast communication scheme in order to efficiently deliver the information requested by drivers. In this paper, a local traffic aware unicast routing scheme is proposed. To overcome network fragmentation, the proposed scheme relies on base stations and virtual base stations to transmit information from source car to the destination car using backhaul link. In this model, as base stations are sparsely deployed in the junction areas, a car moving in the junction area acts as a virtual base station node to support the routing process in the absence of a base station. Moreover, it avoids the impact of unreliable channel on information delivery. In the proposed scheme, each base station and virtual base station uses the short status messages (beacons) exchanged by the cars to form a local database of car locations. The stored information is used to find a base station or virtual base station that offers a minimum delay path to the destination car. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing routing schemes in terms of end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio. The proposed scheme is also validated by a connected car prototype built in an indoor laboratory environment.