Roadside-Aided Routing (RAR) in Vehicular Networks

Inter-Vehicle Communications (IVC) and Roadside-to-Vehicle Communications (RVC) in vehicular networks based on IEEE 802.11 are emerging technologies for future Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). This paper presents a new efficient routing approach, called RAR (Roadside-Aided Routing), that is the first one to exploit the unique characteristics of vehicular networks. A novel affiliation method is proposed to affiliate a vehicle to several Roadside Units based on road constraints. This scheme allows (a) agent advertisement to be broadcast in one hop (instead of multi-hop), (b) routing to be done in single phase, comparing to two phases, (c) to eliminate the use of hierarchical addressing which is commonly used in single-phase schemes. Simulation results of ns-2 show that RAR approach can provide a high packet delivery rate in vehicular networks with a low and constant overhead.