Dynamic opportunistic routing protocol for ad-hoc Internet of Vehicles (IoV)

Abstract

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) aka V2X is a growing area of research that aims at information exchange between vehicles and all other related objects to develop intelligent transportation systems. IoVs are characterized by high mobility, high-speed internet, varying node density, and dynamic topology and aim to minimize and communicate situations like traffic congestion, accidents, etc. Discovering a routing path in a highly unstable network environment to ensure the successful delivery of packets with minimal overheads. Finding reliable routing links as against shortest path routing is a necessity in IoV networks. In this paper, a routing protocol coined as the dynamic opportunistic routing protocol for IoV (DORP-IoV) is presented. DORP-IoV is an on-demand position-based protocol that seeks the advantage of wireless broadcast advantage to select a hop close to the virtual line of sight between source and destination for communicating the information to the destination. Vehicle movement direction and vehicle density around the ideal hop location are also considered while selecting the next hop for information forwarding. Communicating the information through an optimal number of intermediate nodes is the novelty of the work which ensures better packet delivery with minimized delay and routing overheads. The performance of DORP-IoV is evaluated and results are compared with the performance of Weighted- Greedy Perimeter Coordinator Routing (W-GPCR), Greedy Perimeter Coordinator Routing, and Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing for varying node density and network connections for various metrics. DORP-IoV shows an improved performance in the range of 8–12% for packet delivery with similar performance for average end-to-end delay compared to W-GPCR. The optimal hop selection mechanism in DORP-IoV reduces the number of hops by 10–30% compared to W-GPCR.