A trust based energy and mobility aware routing protocol to improve infotainment services in VANETs

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) is a collection of self-organized high mobility vehicles connected wirelessly without any central management. In this, infotainment services like, live video streaming for entertainment and emergency message dissemination for driver safety has gained incredible attention. Since mobile vehicles relay on battery power, fast and reliable broadcasting of multimedia and emergency messages has become one of the key challenges. Towards this, an Energy and Mobility Aware Routing Protocol (EM-ARP) is proposed to improve infotainment services by reducing delay and energy consumption in VANETs. The proposed technique includes two algorithms by leveraging the cross layer paradigm. Firstly, proposed EM-ARP dynamically chooses Cooperative Relay Vehicles (CRVs) based on battery power and mobility of the nodes in the direction of destination. Thus, new routing algorithm balance the high mobility, direction and energy disparity to enhance the quality of streaming and information dissemination. Secondly, a finest path between source and destination is estimated through the trust value along the path and is calculated by considering three critical factors like Link Expiration Time (LET), Hop Count and Congestion along the path. The path with highest trust value is selected for networking of multimedia data and safety information. Upon extensive simulation using Network Simulator (NS-2.34), the performance of the proposed EM-ARP is examined for energy consumption, reliability, packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay metrics by varying the network size, vehicle speed and packet size. Simulation results exemplify that the proposed EM-ARP outperforms over existing ad-hoc routing approaches under the various performance metrics.