A Street-Centric Opportunistic Routing Protocol Based on Link Correlation for Urban VANETs

In urban vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), due to the high mobility and uneven distribution of vehicles, how to select an optimal relaying node in an intra-street and how to determine a street selection at the intersection are two challenging issues in designing an efficient routing protocol in complex urban environments. In this paper, we build a link model with a Wiener process to predict the probability of link availability, which considers the stable and unstable vehicle states according to the behavior of vehicles. We introduce a novel concept called the link correlation which represents the influence of different link combinations in network topology to transmit a packet with less network resource consumption and higher goodput. Based on this concept, we design an opportunistic routing metric called the expected transmission cost over a multi-hop path (ETCoP) implemented with our link model as the selection guidance of a relaying node in intra-streets. This metric can also provide assistance for the next street selection at an intersection. Finally, we propose a street-centric opportunistic routing protocol based on ETCoP for VANETs (SRPE). Simulation results show that our proposed SRPE outperforms the conventional protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, and network yield.