UAV-assisted reactive routing for urban VANETs

The routing is challenging in VANETs especially in urban areas, where the path failures occur regularly due to the rapid change of network topology caused by the high mobility. When a routing path is established between two different vehicles, it must be stable and well-connected in order to guarantee a reliable and safe delivery of packets. The aim of this work is to present a new reactive routing technique providing effective and well-regulated communication paths. These discovered paths are created based on robust flooding discovery process involving UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) to ensure the connectivity when the network is sparsely connected. The proposed technique is evaluated using NS-2 simulator and compared with on-demand protocols dedicated for VANETs. Simulation results show clearly that our approach gives interesting outcomes ensuring a high delivery ratio with a minimum delay. This hybrid communication between the vehicles and UAVs is attractive to initiate more smart connected nodes in the near future.