A lifetime-based routing protocol for connecting VANETs to the Internet

Inter-Vehicle Communications have recently attracted research from both academia and industry. In such networks, vehicles should be able to communicate among each other (V2V) as well as with roadside Infrastructure units (V2I). These units provide some services such as driver information systems and Internet access. Because of the high speed and high mobility of vehicles, establishing and maintaining a connection to these units is very challenging. We introduce a new protocol which uses the characteristics of vehicle movements to predict the vehicle behavior and select a route with the longest life time to connect to the wired network. It aims at spreading the advertisement messages through multi-hops without flooding the network, do seamless hand-overs and select the most stable routes to these units. We performed some simulations and compared the performance of our work with some well-known protocols.