Delay-Optimal Data Forwarding in Vehicular Sensor Networks

Abstract: Vehicular Sensor Network (VSN) is emerging as a new solution for monitoring urban environments such as Intelligent Transportation Systems and air pollution. One of the crucial factors that determine the service quality of urban monitoring applications is the delivery delay of sensing data packets in the VSN. In this paper, we study the problem of routing data packets with minimum delay in the VSN, by exploiting i) vehicle traffic statistics, ii) anycast routing and iii) knowledge of future trajectories of vehicles such as buses. We first introduce a novel road network graph model that incorporates the three factors into the routing metric. We then characterize the packet delay on each edge as a function of the vehicle density, speed and the length of the edge. Based on the network model and delay function, we formulate the packet routing problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and develop an optimal routing policy by solving the MDP. Evaluations using real vehicle traces in a city show that our routing policy significantly improves the delay performance compared to existing routing protocols.