A Real-Time Aware Routing Strategy in Smart City Environments

In future smart cities, the proliferation and mobility of smart devices will bring many challenges to efficient communication for the city-wide networking, including frequent link fluctuation and disconnection. GSTAR (Generalized storage-aware routing) has been a robust routing protocol that utilizes in-network storage to address these challenges. Unfortunately, the cache- and-forward mechanism adopted by GSTAR usually results in extra delay for storing real-time data, and thus makes it not applicable for some particular real- time applications, which crucially require low latency. Motivated by this problem, we propose a real-time aware strategy to reduce the total delay of time- sensitive data for real-time applications. Also, we specifically analyze the threshold to store and forward via mathematical modeling and access the rationality of associated parameters. Through NS3-based simulation, we show that our designed real-time aware strategy can decrease the average delay of time-sensitive data and prevent the block of time-insensitive data compared with other strategies.