A node management scheme for R2V connections in RSU-supported Vehicular Adhoc Networks

Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs) have become a popular research topic in recent years. In VANETs, RSU-to-Vehicle (R2V) unicast has a great deal of potential because it enables a Road-Side Unit (RSU) to contact a specific car and provide customized pushing services. However, to date, R2V has only been considered by a few works as it is difficult for the RSU to gather information about cars that are several hops way. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a scheme called RSU-Based Node Tracking (RBNT). Given on a predetermined road framework, RBNT chooses vehicles as Relay Nodes that connect with each other distributedly and form a hierarchical structure. Then, the RSU can connect to cars in its management area through the Relay Nodes. The results of simulations conducted to evaluate RBNT´s performance demonstrate that the scheme´s connection delay is significantly lower than that of existing approaches, and its coverage range is stable under different traffic densities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that focuses on the R2V unicast issue and provides all the above advantages.