A novel cloud-based traffic aware data routing protocol for smart connected vehicles

In recent years, increasing concern about safe driving has stimulated the development of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). One of the critical technologies for realizing ITS is sharing traffic information between vehicles in real-time. Due to the inherently unstable network topology in the vehicular network environment, achieving reliable vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication becomes a challenging research direction. Aiming at this critical issue, we design a cloud computing-assisted traffic-aware data sharing protocol to improve the inter-vehicles data transmission performance. Briefly, by assuming a heterogeneous vehicular-cellular network environment, vehicles can utilize the cellular network’s low latency and high reliability to request the real-time public traffic information of a large area through the cloud. Based on the real-time public traffic information of the current area, i.e., the traffic density, the source vehicle can calculate a reliable data transmission route for delivering data packets to the destination vehicle. We further verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in packet delivery by conducting simulation experiments and comparing the simulation result with other data routing protocols.