An Energy-efficient and Buffer-aware Routing Protocol for Opportunistic Smart Traffic Management

Smart Traffic Management (STM) is a major application domain for developing Smart City systems. In an STM, sensors attached to the vehicles sense the environment and exchanges the sensed data with other vehicles. Due to the high rate of mobility, an STM suffers from frequent disconnections and need to resort to opportunistic encounters for communication. Since the sensors used in STM are having limited energy and buffer space, designing energy-efficient and buffer-aware message forwarding is quite challenging in an opportunistic STM. In this paper, we have designed an energy-efficient and buffer-aware routing protocol, EBR, for an opportunistic STM, which will select the relay nodes based on their remaining energy level and buffer space. We have conducted extensive simulations for evaluating the performance of our proposed EBR protocol. We also have developed a prototype smart vehicular test-bed for evaluating performance of the EBR, in real time. Both simulation and test-bed results show that the EBR outperforms some of the existing opportunistic routing protocols in terms of delivery ratio, delivery delay and energy efficiency.