An efficient approach for load balancing in vehicular ad-hoc networks

With the rapid increase in vehicular traffic in urban areas, optimal use of available resources is necessary to minimize the cost while maintaining the safety, and the quality of service. For this purpose, Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are emerging, connecting vehicles with static road side units (RSUs) serving as a backbone. For energy efficiency, vehicles may upload data to the nearest RSU by multi-hop routing via shortest paths. But it drains the energy of the nodes nearer to the RSU faster leading to frequent recharging of batteries. For cost-efficient design and longer battery life, both optimal placement of RSUs and uniform power dissipation of nodes are necessary in VANETs. In this paper, a novel approach of load balanced routing is proposed to improve the network stability and battery lifetime in individual nodes. Assuming variable energy levels of transmission in each vehicle, our analysis establishes some upper bounds on the separation of two consecutive RSUs for nearly load balanced routing. The problem has been defined for linear network with uniform distribution of vehicles over 1-D road. Simulation studies show that the proposed scheme enhances the network performance significantly in terms of energy usage, network load and average packet delay.