Multiple intersection selection routing protocol based on road section connectivity probability for urban VANETs

An efficient routing protocol is of great significance to improve vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) performance. However, due to complex road conditions, intermittent connectivity among vehicles and rapid changes of network topology, how to design an efficient routing protocol in an urban environment to transmit the data packet to the destination remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a multiple intersection selection based on road section connectivity probability routing protocol for vehicle–vehicle (V2V) communication in urban VANETs, which considers the vehicle distribution influenced by traffic lights. First, we present a method to calculate the road section connectivity probability of a two-way lane with traffic lights consideration. Then, we establish an optimization model to select the optimal road path from the source node to the destination node based on the road section connectivity probability. Furthermore, we analyze the relay node selection on the road section after the optimal road path is determined, which discusses the number of neighbor vehicles in the communication range of the vehicle carrying packets and jointly considers the position, speed and direction of vehicles. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed routing protocol increases the packet delivery rate and reduces the end-to-end delay.