A Green Time-Bounded Routing Protocol in Solar-Based Vehicular Networks

Energy saving is always an important issue. Most of the researches pay attention to save the energy but lacking in harvest energy especially the solar energy. The solar panel is an efficient way to harvest more energy. In this works, a solar vehicle equips the solar panel that can charge the battery via the sunlight. The ECR (energy consumption ratio) is used to measure the efficiency of the solar vehicle which is denoted as arrival ratio divided by energy consumption. This work aims to achieve a high ECR of solar vehicles, therefore, the solar vehicle should achieve the time-bounded routing request with high energy efficiency. The solar vehicle should speed up to satisfy time bounded routing request and slow down to charge the battery when the solar illumination is high. To achieve that, a green time-bounded routing protocol is proposed to make the solar vehicle can satisfy the time-bounded routing request and charge the battery simultaneously. Finally, simulation results illustrate the performance improvement in remaining battery energy, arrival ratio, and ECR.