Exploiting trust, influence, and physical proximity for improving routing performance in vehicular ad hoc networks: The SCALE protocol

Abstract

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are receiving increased attention, and several routing protocols have been proposed already by the research community. In such a framework, social aspects and human mobility are important performance enablers, which however are mostly overlooked. In this work, we propose the socially aware CLWPR (SCALE) protocol, significantly enhancing cross-layer weighted position-based routing (CLWPR), a routing protocol for urban VANET environments, combining social properties such as trust, influence, and users' individual mobility patterns to its core design in order to support an efficient content dissemination scheme. The design principles of SCALE that rely on both online and offline social metrics quantifying relationships on social networking platforms and opportunistic contacts of nodes due to physical proximity, respectively, are presented, while nodes with close online and offline social relationship are favored as next forwarder nodes. Subsequently we provide the performance evaluation of SCALE against other routing protocols in distributed vehicular networks, employing representative urban scenarios with synthetic and real traffic. It is shown that the proposed approach presents improved performance in terms of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and throughput when compared with other similar protocols by an average of 37% in scenarios with synthetic dataset and 58% with real dataset for PDR and by an average of 45% in scenarios with synthetic dataset and 61% with real dataset for throughput. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.