Delay Tolerant Routing in Sparse Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Low density of network nodes in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) outside the rush hours and in peripheral areas limits usability of traditional ad hoc networking, which requires end-to-end connectivity between communicating parties. In this article, we survey how usability of vehicular networks could be escalated with delay-tolerant networking, in which vehicles store and carry network data while waiting opportunities to forward it. With delay-tolerant networking applications are able to get eventual data delivery even in sparse networks. We address the routing problem in delay-tolerant vehicular networks and introduce a novel geographical routing scheme, which is based on movement predictions. As our simulations show, the presented protocol attains efficient results even in sparse networks.