Patent ID: 7885285

Claim:
In a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) in which a packet is to be wirelessly transmitted from a first vehicle to a destination, a method of determining a second vehicle among a plurality of vehicles in the VANET to which the packet is to be forwarded from the first vehicle, the method comprising the steps of: at the first vehicle, determining the second vehicle to forward the packet from the first vehicle based on pre-calculated expected latency data corresponding to the next vehicle, the pre-calculated expected latency data indicative of an expected latency for communication of the packet from the first vehicle to the destination if the packet is forwarded from the first vehicle to the second vehicle, the pre-calculated expected latency data having been calculated in advance of said step of determining the second vehicle during a pre-compute phase prior to run-time, wherein the step of determining the second vehicle to forward the packet comprises the step of: applying a utility function to the pre-calculated expected latency data corresponding to a plurality of vehicles in the VANET located within a transmission range of a wireless communication device of the first vehicle to obtain a plurality of real numbers each corresponding to the plurality of vehicles; selecting at least one of the plurality of vehicles based on the real number as the second vehicle to forward the packet; and wherein the second vehicle to forward the packet is determined based on pre-calculated communication probability data corresponding to the second vehicle in addition to the pre-calculated expected latency data, the communication probability data having been calculated in advance of said step of determining the second vehicle during the pre-compute phase prior to the run-time and being indicative of probability that there exists a communication path from the first vehicle to neighbors of the destination within a transmission range of a wireless communication device of the first vehicle, within a predetermined time and within a predetermined number of hops between the vehicles in the VANET, if the packet is forwarded from the first vehicle to the second vehicle; and wherein the utility function ƒ is ƒ=ατ(x,d)+(1−α)ρ(x,d,T), where x is a current location of the first vehicle or the plurality of vehicles, d is the location of the destination, τ(x,d) is the latency of communication from the current location x to the destination d, α is a positive weight constant less than 1, T is a time limit, and ρ is a pre-computed communication probability, and at least one of the plurality of vehicles with a smallest value of the real number of the utility function ƒ is selected as the second vehicle; and forwarding the packet from the source vehicle to the determined second vehicle.