Mobility Pattern Aware Routing for Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks

Abstract

The intelligent transportation system (ITS), a worldwide initiative program utilizes novel information and communication technology for transport infrastructure and vehicles. Among extensive ITS components, efficient communication system is the most important role which connects numerous vehicles with roadside infrastructure and management center in the ITS program. Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) has been a cornerstone of the envisioned ITS without infrastructure. However, multihop data delivery through VANET is difficult by the fact that vehicular networks are highly mobile and frequently disconnected. Thus, traditional ad hoc routing protocols are not well suited for these high dynamic network. In this paper we propose a new heterogeneous vehicular network (HVN) architecture and a mobility pattern aware routing for HVN. HVN integrates wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN) with VANET technology and reserves advantages of better coverage in WMAN and high data rate in VANET. Vehicles in HVN can communicate with each other and access Internet ubiquitously. We mainly focus on the routing issue for HVN, because the routing protocol for HVN is different from those used in MANET or VANET. With the WMAN infrastructure support in HVN, the mobility pattern aware routing protocol can adopt the whole information of the vehicular network and unique characteristics of vehicle mobility to establish a reliable route path in high dynamic vehicular network.