An efficient cooperative load balancing approach in RSU-based Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs)

Abstract

Efficient data dissemination is a key of successful Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) applications. In VANETs, one of the main challenges is how to overcome the intermittent vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity problem. Secondly, how to increase the connecting possibility in the sparse environment (during off peak hour, highway etc.). Placing Road Side Units (RSUs) along roadside acting as a buffer point, is one of the solutions proposed, recently. However, each RSU has limited bandwidth and coverage range. During rush hours an RSU might be overloaded by the passing vehicles. This endures a higher request drop rate in the overloaded RSUs. In our previous work we have proposed a cooperative load balancing (CLB) solution to handle this situation. In this paper, we investigate that with the prior knowledge of other RSUs' locations and the final destination, the system performance further can be improved significantly. We propose a modified CLB (MCLB) approach in this paper. A number of simulation experiments demonstrate the superiority of the MCLB approach over the CLB and the standalone approaches.