A split reliable transport protocol over the vehicular ad hoc network communication environment

Abstract

AbstractTo have reliable transmission in the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) environment, a split reliable transport protocol (SRTP) is proposed in this paper. The basic idea of SRTP is to separate a long connection into several subconnections in order to reduce the overhead of packet retransmission, in which the length of each subconnection depends on links’ states between vehicles. Three main issues that need to be resolved for SRTP are the following: (i) how to decide the length of each subconnection when a connection is established initially; (ii) how to enhance the connection's stability after the connection is established to deal with the fast topology change in the VANET environment; and (iii) how to deal with packet congestion. An estimative scheme using location and speed information of vehicles to estimate the connectivity time of the links between vehicles are used in SRTP. The estimated values can be used to decide the lengths of subconnections and adjust them dynamically. Another mechanism named channel busy rate aware congestion avoidance is proposed to avoid network congestion in the ad hoc network environment. The simulation results show that SRTP can be operated well in the VANET environment, and the aforementioned three issues can be appropriately resolved. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.