A routing protocol for urban vehicular ad hoc networks to support non-safety applications

The Urban Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (UVANET) provides non-safety applications like media sharing, internet service, file transfer, gaming, and so on. Routing plays an important role in providing better services to the users in UVANET. In this paper, a novel routing protocol is proposed for UVANET to support non-safety applications. We consider a non-safety application wherein the drivers and passengers of different parking lots can play multi-player games with each other. To play the games smoothly, the game data should reach the destination in a minimum time. Simulation results show that when the vehicle density in the city area is high, the proposed protocol meets the end-to-end delay tolerance of 100 ms. Finally, an experiment is performed to validate the proposed routing protocol by running a simple puzzle game in a UVANET prototype designed in an indoor laboratory environment and in an outdoor environment. Keywords: UVANET, Non-safety applications, Routing, Gaming, Slow-paced games