Balloon Based Communication to Improve Performance in Vehicular Delay Tolerant Network

In sparse vehicular network communication, link exists for short time between the communicating nodes and the delivery probability will be less with no definite path from the source to the destination. For this purpose Vehicular Delay Tolerant Network is used in such scenarios to improve the performance. A routing protocol for Vehicular Delay Tolerant Network's must make use of the available resources in an efficient manner creating multi-hop paths between the source and the destination. In proposed work, two types of delay tolerant nodes are used to increase the delivery probability, special nodes and balloons. When normal nodes generate message, they will transfer it to the special nodes which will again pass it to other special nodes or to the balloons or to a destination node. Balloons will exchange messages between special nodes and balloons themselves. The proposed approach is tested for five different scenarios and compared with Geographic routing protocol. The delivery probability in the range of 49-89% is achieved and messages are delivered using fewer hops (on an average 3). It is shown that this approach significantly improves delivery probability and reduces overhead ratio.