Collaborative Intelligence Enabled Routing in Green IoV: A Grid and Vehicle Density Prediction-Based Protocol

Green Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a newly-emerged research area which focuses on reducing networking overhead and improving communication efficiency in future vehicular cyber-physical systems (VCPS). A critical requirement to realize such tasks in Green IoV is the achievement of effective routing protocols for data dissemination. However, maintaining end-to-end communication and reducing the communication overhead at the same time is quite challenging due to high vehicle dynamics and complex traffic environments. In this paper, we propose a vehicle density prediction-based routing protocol called VDPGrid. Firstly, we introduce a vehicle density prediction model according to the spatio-temporal features of vehicle trajectories. Then, to reduce the communication overhead and improve communication efficiency, we divide the map into grids and present a routing path evaluation scheme that jointly considers the vehicle density, link quality, and routing length. Moreover, a grid-based routing method is proposed to select the optimal relay node according to real-time traffic information. Finally, extensive experiments using real-world vehicle trajectories are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our method.