Hybrid-Vehcloud: An Obstacle Shadowing Approach for VANETs in Urban Environment

Routing of messages in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) is challenging due to obstacle shadowing regions with high vehicle densities, which leads to frequent disconnection problems and blocks radio wave propagation between vehicles. Previous researchers used multi-hop, vehicular cloud or roadside infrastructures to solve the routing issue among the vehicles, but they suffer from significant packet delays and frequent packet losses arising from obstacle shadowing. We proposed a vehicular cloud based hybrid technique called Hybrid-Vehcloud to disseminate messages in obstacle shadowing regions, and multi-hop technique to disseminate messages in non-obstacle shadowing regions. The novelty of our approach lies in the fact that our proposed technique dynamically adapts between obstacle shadowing and non-obstacle shadowing regions. Simulation based performance analysis of Hybrid-Vehcloud showed improved performance over Cloud-assisted Message Downlink Dissemination Scheme (CMDS), Cross-Layer Broadcast Protocol (CLBP) and Cloud-VANET schemes at high vehicle densities.