ARDENT: A Proactive Agent-Based Routing Protocol for Internet of Vehicles

Abstract

The design of an efficient routing algorithm for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) poses several problems due to its special characteristics, including nodes high-speed mobility, frequent topology change, link instability, and the presence of radio obstacles. Geographic routing protocols are a promising solution for the IoV, since the main routing parameter used by these protocols is the location information accessible through a location-based service. However, location services and traffic status measurements generate high network overhead. In this paper, we first propose a novel proactive location service called ATLAS that utilizes smart mobile agents to avoid the traffic overhead of traditional services and reduce the location update latency. Then, we present an Agent-Based Proactive Geographic Routing Protocol called ARDENT to route data packets with reduced delay and higher delivery ratio. The proposed systems aim to benefit from the IoV environment and multiagent characteristics to adapt to high-speed mobility, reduce the communication interruptions and the number of control messages overhead generated by the location service, and produce a complete geographic routing protocol suitable for urban settings. The evaluation of ATLAS shows significant performance improvements in terms of query success ratio and location update delay. In addition, the results of ARDENT illustrate its superiority in terms of data packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay as compared to similar routing protocols.