A Realistic Spatial-Distribution-Based Connectivity-Aware Routing Protocol in Multilevel Scenarios of Urban VANETs

In multilevel scenarios, conventional routing protocols choose the next forwarding street based on a metric called connectivity considering the number or density of vehicles. However, they ignore that the uneven spatial distribution of vehicles could also significantly change the connectivity of single-level or multilevel streets. This letter proposes a spatial-distribution-based connectivity-aware routing protocol. It divides a street into multiple segments and gathers the vehicle number and position distribution at each segment to assess the connectivity quality of segments. Then, the proposed protocol evaluates the connectivity of the whole street, in which the shadowing of overpasses would also be taken into account if the street is multilevel. The experimental results show that the proposed protocol outperforms conventional protocols in both end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio.