GeoSPIN: An Approach for Geocast Routing Based on SPatial INformation in VANETs

Abstract

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) have been widely used to provide data exchange services in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), which should facilitate user's routines. At the same time that user's routines are improved, they can also be used as an important source of data for helping the decision-making process of VANET services. These routines can be acquired from vehicle's trajectories through the use of Global Positioning Systems (GPS). In this context, the combination of location-based data and data forwarding methods brings interesting challenges since these topics are not directly related. Therefore, the key idea of this work is to provide a geocast routing mechanism in VANETs based on daily movements of users in their vehicles. The main contribution is related to the delivery rate, which increases in partitioned and sparsely connected networks. The results show the efficiency of our new method to perform opportunistic routing based on location data, which discovers the best routes to forward packets through the network.