A Community-Based Routing Protocol for Collecting Data in VSNs

Abstract

The inter-region interest data gathering service in vehicular sensor networks (VSNs) can help improve the driving safety and efficiency in a city. However, the large geographical distance between a data collector and the region of interest poses challenges for reliable data transmission, particularly with rapidly changing topology and frequent link disruption. In this paper, based on the moving behaviors of vehicles, we divide vehicles into different communities and propose a reliable lightweight opportunistic routing (RLOR) protocol for inter-region interest data gathering in VSNs. The RLOR protocol consists of a quota-style message replication procedure (MRP) and a community-aware message forwarding procedure (MFP). In MRP, one vehicle node sprays its limited message copies to a few of vehicle nodes that have more stable link connections until the left message copy is one. Then in MFP we forward the last message copy to a vehicle node that belongs to same community with the collector, or an active vehicle node that may encounter more different vehicle nodes. Simulation experiments under ONE (Opportunistic Networks Environment) show that our proposed RLOR protocol outperforms other current popular replication-based routing protocols in terms of message delivery ratio and communication cost while having acceptable latency.