Infrastructure-assisted geo-routing for cooperative vehicular networks

Cooperative vehicular systems require the design of reliable and efficient multi-hop networking protocols to achieve their foreseen benefits. Although many geo-routing protocols have been proposed in the literature, few contributions have analysed the benefits that road side infrastructure units could provide to successfully route data from source to destination. In this context, this paper proposes a novel infrastructure-assisted routing approach designed to improve the end-to-end performance, range and operation of multi-hop vehicular communications by exploiting the reliable interconnection of infrastructure units. The conducted investigation shows that the proposed infrastructure-assisted routing approach achieves its objectives, and reduces the routing overhead compared to other greedy position-based geo-routing protocols. Finally, the paper shows that to obtain the maximum benefits from the proposed infrastructure-assisted routing approach, optimal infrastructure deployment strategies must be further investigated.