LOTIR: A Routing Protocol for Multi-hop V-to-I Communication Using Local Traffic Information

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is an emerging technology that can be applied to safety, transport efficiency, or infotainment applications for roads and highways. However, due to its unique features, such as dynamic mobility patterns and uneven distributions of vehicles, VANET faces many challenging research issues for robust data dissemination in the network. Many routing protocols have been proposed for VANET in the past few years, and the idea of utilizing a navigation system to assist the routing protocol for selecting the next best forwarder has become increasingly popular. However, it might not be realistic to assume that every vehicle is equipped with a navigation system. In addition, due to privacy concerns, drivers might not want to reveal their planned routes to other cars. In this work, we propose a new routing protocol, called LOTIR (LOcal Traffic Information Routing), that relies on only local traffic information and does not require the assistance of a navigation system. LOTIR is a DTN-based routing protocol that utilizes the car-following theory and traffic light information to decide the next carrier to forward the data to. We implement LOTIR in NS-2, and our results show that it can achieve similar performance as prior work which depends on the availability of global network topology information.