Efficient and viable intersection-based routing in VANETs on top of a virtualization layer

Intersection Intelligence: Supporting Urban Platooning with Virtual Traffic Lights over Virtualized Intersection-Based Routing

“…In the comparison between configurations 1 and 3, it turns out that our proposal for VTL management attains greater savings than that of [ 14 , 20 ]. The average difference is around 2% of global travel times and 3% of fuel consumption, which can be taken as a justification for the increased complexity of our stack of protocols ( Figure 1 ) in comparison with placing VTL logic directly on top of IEEE 802.11p (It must be noted that the VaNetLayer and VNIBR protocols are of general use, so they can support any other communication services in VANETs in addition to VTL management, as explained in [ 12 , 13 ]). The advantages are most noticeable with medium traffic densities, because our proposal—thanks to the virtualization infrastructure—supports multi-hop communications and persistent state information; therefore, we can manage larger VTL areas to coordinate more incoming vehicles at each intersection.…”

“…This is a big deal with conventional communication protocols in VANETs, not so much because they have difficulties to tackle the high mobility of the nodes (the literature of VANET routing is now rich and extensive [ 31 ]), but because they do not provide the means to maintain persistent information at any given location without the support of external infrastructure. For this reason, our proposal is grounded on a virtualization layer and specific routing algorithms presented in [ 12 , 13 ], adding new mechanisms to manage platoons and VTLs. The stack of protocols we use is represented in Figure 1 .…”

“…In the following subsections, we summarize the mechanisms than underpin our proposal from the virtualization layer ( Section 3.1 ) and the network layer ( Section 3.2 ). Further details and experimental assessments can be found at [ 12 , 13 ], showing that these underlying protocols can attain good performance in urban scenarios of V2V and V2I communications.…”

“…On top of these foundations, three different flavors of VNIBR were developed, which we use in the experiments of Section 5 : the reactive version (VNIBR-R) builds the communication routes on request, looking for the destination by broadcasting requests omnidirectionally; the proactive version (VNIBR-P) manages trees of routes between intersections, aiming to provide faster responses at the expense of increased overhead; finally, the encounter-based version (VNIBR-E) builds the routes on demand, but aided by lists that keep track of the last time any vehicle traversed any intersection. The details of the operation of the three protocols can be found in [ 13 ].…”

“…We present protocols for the management of VTLs and urban platoons, built upon a virtual infrastructure for urban V2V communications [ 12 , 13 ] that turns intersections into virtual containers of data and algorithms that facilitate platoon join maneuvers (hence the title “intersection intelligence”). The proposal is assessed by means of simulations, measuring the performance achieved with various communication protocols in terms of travel duration, fuel consumption and number of platoon join operations completed successfully.…”