LIVE: load balanced inter-vehicle routing protocol

The use of inter-vehicle communications protocols to increase the safety of highways requires improved quality and reliability of service. In particular, it is important that in case of emergencies, when the inter-vehicle traffic increases exponentially, the message delay should be kept low. We present a reliable hierarchical routing protocol that uses load balancing to keep low message delay even in presence of high level of traffic. Our protocol is based on geographical routing. The protocol is designed for highway travelers but can be used in any mobile ad-hoc network. The highway is divided in virtual cells, which moves as the vehicles moves. The cell members might choose one or more cell-leaders that will behave for a certain time interval as base stations. Every node has its geographical position given by Global Positioning System (GPS). Cell-leaders form a virtual backbone used to forward messages among nodes on different cells. The traffic is distributed among cell-leaders in order to optimize the communication delay. We study the effect of load balancing in minimizing delay. Our simulation results show that our proposed protocol improves the network utilization compared to existing inter-vehicles protocols