Connectivity Aware Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for UAVs Assisted Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is one of the highly trending technologies used in a vast number of applications in recent days. VANETs are built with a vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure-oriented communication model that becomes unstable due to its dynamic nature and high speed. Through this characteristic end to end delay and routing overhead is increased, as well as link failure frequently caused by the presence of ground level obstacles in VANETs. To overcome such drawback, UAVs assisted VANETs are introduced. This greatly helps to improve the network from ground level obstacles. Hence, the communication processed in an air medium transmission rate is increased. Currently, link failure is needed to get addressed. In this paper, Connectivity Aware Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for UAVs Assisted VANETs (CAEER-UAVs) is proposed to enhance the network performance. Through this routing protocol, the connectivity and density measurements are done that leads to improve network performance in terms of link failure. The simulation is carried out in NS2 and SUMO. The parameters which are considered for the performance analysis are energy efficiency, packet delivery ratio, end to end delay and routing overhead. To analyze the performance of the proposed CAEER-UAVs it is compared with previous studies such as ESRP-UAVs and RJEDC-UAVs. From the results, it is proven that the proposed CAEER-UAVs achieves 11% to 17% higher energy efficiency, 10% to 22% higher packet delivery ratio, 70ms to 110ms lower end to end delay and 330 to 630 packets lower routing overhead when compared with the earlier works ESRP-UAVs and RJEDC-UAVs.