UAV-assisted supporting services connectivity in urban VANETs

International audienceTo keep the services and applications of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) stable and active, Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are considered as an essential building block to maintain and manage its features. A wide deployment of VANETs is possible only after addressing numerous research challenges. One of the most complicated issues consists in designing a routing strategy, taking into consideration several serious constraints, and especially in a network such as VANET. The severity of these issues would be increased significantly when a VANET is deployed over an urban area, where we distinguish the high mobility of nodes and existing obstructions (e.g., buildings, bridges, tunnels, etc.). In this paper, an efficient routing solution based on a flooding technique is conceived to make the data delivery more reliable and to guarantee robust paths. Vehicles can cooperate in ad hoc fashion with existing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This kind of collaboration provides reliable routing paths and ensures alternative solutions in the case of path failures. Furthermore, a prediction technique is used to expect the expiration time of each discovered path. To limit the overhead over the network, all control packets are characterized by their static size making the originality of this work. Based on the simulation outputs, we discuss the performances of the proposed approach as compared with other dedicated previous schemes in terms of several metrics. The obtained results demonstrate that the hybrid communication between vehicles and UAVs based on the proposed flooding technique is perfectly suited to improve the data delivery process