UAV-assisted ubiquitous communication architecture for urban VANET environment

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have gained significant attention in the past decade for their potential to support intelligent transportation systems and entertainment facilities in smart cities. However, VANETs face significant challenges, such as intermittent connectivity and poor signal strength caused by abstraction from buildings and poles. The excessive packet drop rate results in re-transmissions which negatively affect the end-to-end delay. Diverse ranges of vehicle mobility increase the routing overhead and make the VANET an unscalable network. The severity of these challenges becomes even more intensified when deployed in an urban area and limits the widespread adoption of VANETs. The core aim of this study is to investigate the potential of integrating micro-UAVs with VANETs that can be used for bandwidth hungry as well as delay sensitive applications of intelligent transportation systems. The proposed model leverages the line-of-sight communication capabilities of UAVs to facilitate communication between vehicles and infrastructure. We demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in high-density urban areas, where traditional VANET struggles to perform. Experiment results show that the proposed model achieves the probability of line-of-sight approaches to 1. This helps to provide a reliable link and has better receive signal strength which results in higher throughput for entertainment applications and short message delay for safety and interactive applications.