CBS: Community-Based Bus System as Routing Backbone for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Compared to general vehicular systems, bus systems have advantages including wide coverage, fixed routes, and regular service. Inspired by these unique features of the bus systems, we propose to use the bus systems as routing backbones of VANETs. In this work, we present a Community-based Bus System (CBS) which consists of two components: a community-based backbone and a routing scheme over the backbone. The backbone construction is a one-off operation which is done offline while the routing is done online in individual buses. We build a community-based backbone by applying community detection techniques and propose a two-level routing scheme which operates over the backbone. The proposed routing scheme performs sequentially in the inter-community level and the intra-community level, and is able to support message delivery to both buses and specific locations/areas. We develop a probabilistic model to analyze the message delivery latency of CBS. The average error of the analytically-derived latency is shown to be 8.9 percent of the latency derived from the real traces. Extensive experiments are conducted on real-world traces from the Beijing bus system and the Dublin bus system and the results show that CBS can significantly lower the delivery latency and improve the delivery ratio, compared to the existing solutions. CBS is a general solution which is applicable to any bus-based VANETs.