Catching up with traffic lights for data delivery in vehicular ad hoc networks

The data delivery in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is based on the wireless communication among vehicles (V2V) and infrastructures (V2I). This delivery obviously depends on the mobility of the vehicles (e.g. with carry-and-forward). However, the mobility of the vehicles is not only affected by the vehicle itself, but also by some external means, such as the signal operations of traffic lights. The red light stops the vehicles at the intersection, which will increase the delivery delay of the messages carried by the vehicle with waiting time. However, the red light can also increase the opportunities of vehicles moving behind to catch up with the waited vehicles in forwarding messages. In this paper, we investigate the influence of the traffic lights on data delivery in VANETs, and we estimate the expected data delivery delay along a path with multiple traffic lights. Our intensive simulations verify the proposed model, and evaluate the influence of the traffic lights on data delivery.