MI-VANET: A New Mobile Infrastructure Based
VANET Architecture for Urban Environment
Jie Luo Xinxing Gu Tong Zhao
School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, PKU, Beijing, China
{luojie,gxx,zt,yanwei}@net.pku.edu.cn
Abstract—The vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) has at-
tracted a lot of interest recently. However, traditional VANET
is just an instantiation of MANET in which nodes are treated
equally for data delivery. We first analyze the unique features
of urban VANET that vehicles have different types, and move
as clusters due to the influence of traffic lights. Then a two tier
architecture called Mobile Infrastructure Based VANET (MI-
VANET) is proposed. In this architecture, the buses constitute a
mobile backbone for data delivery while the low tier is composed
of ordinary cars and passengers. MI-VANET will not only bring
the benefit that ordinary cars do not have to forward packets
for other nodes, but also improve the network connectivity.
The corresponding Mobile Infrastructure Registering (MIRG)
and Mobile Infrastructure Routing (MIRT) algorithms are also
presented. The bus line information is made full use in MIRT.
Simulation results show that there is a 40-55% improvement in
delivery ratio while the throughput is even doubled compared to
GPSR in traditional VANET.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Vehicular ad hoc networks have recently received consider-
able attention. The VANETs provides both roadside-to-vehicle
communication (RVC) and inter-vehicle communication (IVC)
capability. IVC works like a multi-hop mobile ad hoc network
(MANET) with its own unique characteristics.
In traditional VANET architectures, nodes are all treated
equally and may participate in packet forwarding. However,
vehicles are different in reality. Some vehicles are not willing
to forward packets for others, and their wireless devices might
be shut down by the driver at any time. While the buses are
much easier to manage by the bus company to provide contin-
uous service. Another unique feature of urban VANETs is that
traffic lights have great influence on the vehicle movement, so
vehicles are moving like clusters. These features should be
considered in the VANET architecture design.
Considering the unique features of urban VANETs, a two-
tier architecture called Mobile Infrastructure Based VANET
(MI-VANET) is proposed in this paper. In MI-VANET ar-
chitecture, the buses constitute a mobile backbone for data
delivery, and the low tier is composed by ordinary cars and
passengers. MI-VANET will not only bring the benefit that
ordinary cars do not have to forward packets for other nodes,
but also improve the network connectivity. The correspond-
ing Mobile Infrastructure Registering (MIRG) and Mobile
Infrastructure Routing (MIRT) algorithms for MI-VANET are
This work is co-supported by the National Key Basic Research Program of
China (No. 2009CB320504) and the National Key Technology R&D Program
of China (No. 2008BAH37B09)
978-1-4244-3574-6/10/$25.00 ©2010 IEEE
Wei Yan
also presented. MIRT estimates the bus density of each road
segment based on the bus line information for road segment
selection.
At last we choose a downtown area in Beijing as the simu-
lation area. Simulation results show significant performance
improvement in packet delivery ratio and throughput. Our
contribution is summarized as:
• A two-tier VANET architecture MI-VANET which is
more suitable for urban environment than traditional
VANET is proposed. In MI-VANET, the buses constitute
a mobile backbone for data delivery.
• The corresponding register method and routing algorithm
for MI-VANET are also developed. The bus line infor-
mation is used for transmission quality estimation in the
routing algorithm.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: The related
work is given in Section II. In section III, we analyze the
unique features of urban VANET. In section IV, the new
architecture MI-VANET is proposed and analyzed. Then cor-
responding register method and routing algorithm for MI-
VANET are described in Section V. Section VI presents
simulation settings and results. Finally, conclusions and future
works are summarized in section VII.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Wireless network architecture has attracted a lot of interest.
In [1], CF Huang proposed a two-tier architecture for MANET.
The goal of this architecture is to support Internet access,
and the high tier nodes are no different from the others
except they have extra network interface connecting to the
cellular/infrastructure network.
Our proposed architecture is somehow like a Wireless Mesh
Networks (WMNs) [2]. A WMNs consist of mesh routers and
mesh clients, where mesh routers have minimal mobility and
form the backbone of WMNs. Different from WMS, the high
tier nodes in MI-VANET can also move with a high speed.
To deal with the rapidly changing network topology, many
routing techniques for VANET are based on location informa-
tion. One famous strategy is GPSR [3]. GPSR selects the node
that is the closest to the destination among the neighboring
nodes one-hop away. When local maximum occurs, the algo-
rithm recovers by routing around the perimeter of the region.
Due to local maximums are common in urban VANETs, GPSR
seems not the best choice. Some other routing protocols for
VANETs have also been proposed. One example is GyTAR
[4], in which the real time road traffic variation is taken into
account. GyTAR dynamically selects the junctions through
which a packet should pass through to its destination. The
carry-and-forward mechanism is used for network disconnec-
tion. However, these routing techniques require the forwarding
ability of each node. Vehicles differences are not considered
in these algorithms.
To evaluate the proposed architecture and routing protocol
by simulation, various traffic mobility models have been
studied. VanetMobiSim [5] is a well known and validated
traffic generator, which is developed by Eurecom. We use this
traffic generator in our simulation studies.
III. U NIQUE F EATURES O F U RBAN V EHICULAR
M OVEMENTS A NALYSIS
Vehicular communication is a new technology including
roadside-to-vehicle communication (RVC) and inter-vehicle
communication (IVC). The roadside-to-vehicle communica-
tion is greatly influenced by the limited connection time. And
most of the previous research on inter-vehicle communication
is just an instantiation of MANETs in which nodes are treated
equally. In the urban environment, vehicular ad hoc network
has many unique features. Firstly, vehicle movements are
constrained by roads. Secondly, in urban VANETs, traffic
lights have great influence on the vehicle movement. Another
important feature of urban VANETs is that vehicles have at
least two different types which are ordinary cars and buses as
analyzed in RBM [7]. All these features are not considered in
the traditional VANETs architecture, so we believe that a new
network architecture is needed for urban VANETs.
Fig. 1. Distance variation between a car and a bus in the experiment
In urban VANET, traffic lights have great influence on the
vehicle movement. Red traffic light at junction stops vehicles
from approaching, which is an important factor to network
disconnection. When the traffic light turns green, stopped
vehicles will continue to move and those moving in the same
direction will be close to each other like a cluster. The nodes
in the same cluster often have a much longer connection time
than road side units, because they have a high probability to
move with the similar patterns. A simple experiment has been
taken in a normal street in Beijing to know the connection time
feature. In this experiment, two vehicles moving in the same
direction are used, one is an ordinary car and the other is a bus.
To know their connection time, the car is 300m behind the bus
at the beginning. After about 350 seconds, the car is 250m in
front of the bus. Figure 1 shows their distance variation. If
the communication range is 200m, their connection time is
about 250s. If they only have a 150m communication range,
the connection time is still about 200s.
As we mentioned above, in urban VANETs, there are
at least two types of vehicles which are ordinary cars and
buses. The number of buses is much less than ordinary cars
under normal conditions. For example, according to Beijing
Traffic Management Bureau [6], about 80 percent of all motor
vehicles in Beijing are ordinary cars, and buses only compose
20 percent. In addition, the buses are larger and more powerful,
therefore they can carry better wireless equipment with a larger
transmission range than ordinary cars. We hope to design a
new network architecture in which the buses constitute the
backbone network. This will not only bring the benefit that
cars do not have to forward packets for other nodes, but also
can improve the network connectivity.
We also studied the bus line character from google map. The
main road segments in the real area showed in figure 2 have 7
bus lines on average. And the departure time interval of each
bus line is about 15 minutes. As there are two directions in
each road, the average time between two adjacent buses is 7∗215
minutes. Another simple experiment is also taken in both rash
hour and normal time. In this experiment we have randomly
taken 10 buses. With the help of the GPS record, we found
that the highest speed of buses in Beijing is about 50km/h,
and the average speed is only about 15km/h, because buses
take a large proportion of time on bus stops and traffic lights.
So the average distance between buses is not very long that
buses can form a mobile backbone.
Fig. 2. A real map from Southern Beijing
IV. A RCHITECTURE
Traditional VANET is an instantiation of MANETs where
nodes are treated equally. On the contrary, in MI-VANET,
the mobile infrastructure including buses and other public
transports constitute the backbone of the networks to provide
services for other vehicles and passengers. MI-VANET is
somehow like a mesh network, but the mobile infrastructures
are moving much more rapidly than mesh routers.
A. Traditional Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks
In the traditional VANETs, when a node wants to send a
message, all the nodes may participate in the data forwarding
according to the routing algorithm. Figure 3 shows a possible
route example of message delivery.

Fig. 3. An example of message delivery in traditional VANETs
B. Mobile Infrastructure Based VANET
Our MI-VANET is a two-tier vehicular ad hoc architecture.
In urban environment, the mobile infrastructure including
buses and other public transports constitute the high tier of the
MI-VANET. Each high tier node is equipped with two wireless
interfaces. One interface has the same communication range
with the low tier nodes to provide service to them. The other
has a relatively larger transmission range on another channel,
and the high tier nodes are communicated with each other in
ad hoc mode by this interface.
Other vehicles and passengers constitute the low tier of
the MI-VANET. Each low tier node has only one wireless
interface, which is used to register and communicate with
its registered bus. In urban environment such as Beijing, we
believe the number of buses is large enough that common cars
can reach a bus with only one hop in the main roads. This can
be expanded to multi-hop if the bus density is low.
Fig. 4. (a) MI-VANET architecture example (b) An example of message
delivery in MI-VANET
Figure 4(a) shows one example of the proposed architecture.
The high tier and low tier are revealed by solid and dash lines,
respectively. When a common car or a passenger wants to
send a message, it first sends the message to its registered bus
(which is called source bus for short). Once the source bus
receives the message from a low tier node, the high tier nodes
will forward the message to the bus which the destination
registered on (called destination bus). At last, the destination
bus will send the message to the destination node. Figure 4(b)
shows an example of message delivery in MI-VANET.
C. Architecture Analysis
Assume that vehicles are uniformly distributed on the road
as figure 5(a). If the average distance between two vehicles is
X, the average distance between two buses will be X/20%,
because buses only compose 20 percent of all motor vehicles.
It seems that to improve the connectivity of the network,
transmission range required between the high tier should be
over five times those of other vehicles.
Fig. 5. (a) Uniformly distributed vehicles (b) Vehicle moves like clusters
But vehicles are not uniformly distributed. Moving vehicles
are affected by traffic lights, and when the light turns green,
those moving in the same direction will be close to each other
like clusters as figure 5(b). In traditional VANET, vehicles
in different cluster may not able to communicate, but things
are different in MI-VANET. Suppose the road segment length
is l, the period of red traffic light is t, and the average
velocity is v, then the expectation distance between two
clusters is min(t ∗ v, l). In this case, without having a five
times transmission range, connectivity of MI-VANET can be
improved compared to traditional VANET, if the high tier com-
munication range is wider than the distance between adjacent
clusters. Additionally, buses are dispatched periodically, so the
distribution of buses in the network is relatively dispersive.
So our proposed MI-VANET architecture will not only bring
the benefit that ordinary cars do not have to forward packets
for other nodes, but also improves the network connectivity.
V. T HE R EGISTER A ND T HE ROUTING
In MI-VANET, only the buses have to periodically send bea-
con packets containing its location and velocity information.
The beacon packets are used to inform the low tier nodes that
services can be provided and tell the neighbor buses to renew
the neighbor table for packet forwarding. The basic problems
for MI-VANET are which bus the low tier node chooses to
register and how the packets are routed on the backbone.
A. Register
Each low tier node in our proposed MI-VANET has to
register on a bus. This method is called MIRG (Mobile
Infrastructure Registering). When the wireless device of a
low tier node is opened, it will wait a beacon period time to
know the nearby buses. Then the node computes the expected
connection time of each nearby bus, and choose the bus with
a longer expected connection time and shorter distance to
register. Suppose dist is the distance between the bus and the
car, vc is the velocity of the car, and vb is the velocity of the
bus. If the two vehicles are moving in the same or opposite
direction, the expected connection time T is about R− dist
v c −v b .
Otherwise the two vehicles are not in a same straight road,
and their communication quality will be bad because obstacles
are common in this situation. Therefore, we do not prefer to
choose these buses and T = 0 in this situation.
Then a score S of each nearby bus will be calculated by:
S = a ∗ (R − dist) + b ∗ T, a and b are weighting f actors
The bus with the highest score will be chosen to register.
When the car is leaving the communication range of its
registered bus, another bus will be chosen with the same
method.
B. Routing
Once a bus (called source bus) receives a packet from a
low tier node, the high tier nodes will forward the message to
the bus which the destination registers on (called destination
bus). The routing algorithm used on the high tier is MIRT
(Mobile Infrastructure Routing). We assume that each bus
knows its location through the GPS service, and has a digital
street map including bus line information. We also suppose
the availability of a location service through which a source
bus can get the location information about destination bus.
MIRT is a location based reactive routing protocol including
two essential parts: 1) selecting an optimal route which con-
sists of a sequence of road segments with the best estimated
transmission quality, and 2) efficiently forwarding packets hop-
by-hop through each road segment in the selected route.
Similar to position-based source routing such as GyTAR
[4], MIRT adopts the road segments based routing approach.
Therefore, data packets will be routed between buses, fol-
lowing the street map topology. In MIRT, the road segments
are chosen one by one, considering the transmission quality
of each road segment. When selecting the next forwarding
road segment, the bus (source bus or an intermediate bus
near a junction) checks the route table and chooses the best
neighboring road segment with a min estimated hop count to
the destination.
To select an optimal route with the min estimated hop count,
we have first to estimate the hop count of each road segment.
As the packets are only routed on the buses and each bus
has a fixed path, we can estimate the hop count of each road
segment by the expectation bus density and road length.
For convenience, we first define the following notations:
• R1 : the low tier transmission range on one channel.
• R2 : the high tier transmission range on another channel.
• Xi : the total route length of bus i
• Lj : the length of road segment j
• Nj : the expected number of buses on road segment j
• Cj : the estimated hop count on road segment j
Suppose the route length of bus i is Xi , the length of road
segment j is Lj , and the route of path i contains road segment
L
j. So the probability that bus i is on road segment j is Xji
and the expected number of buses Nj on road segment j is:
 Lj
Nj = fi,j ∗
X i
i

1, bus line i contains road j (1)
fi,j =
0, bus line i doesn’t contain road j (2)
N
So the density of buses on the road segment j is Ljj .
Suppose when the density of buses on the road segment is
high enough to reach a constant number D (which we choose
D = R22 in our simulation), the transmission quality on this
road segment is rather high. And the hop count Cj on this
road segment can be estimated by:
Lj Nj
Cj = ,( > D)
R2 Lj
Otherwise, the transmission quality is not good on this road
segment. As the network connectivity on each road segment
is positively related to the bus density, we can estimate the
hop count on road segment j by the formula:
D ∗ Lj Lj Nj
Cj = ∗ ,( < D)
Nj R2 Lj
Nj
Where Lj is the bus density of road segment j, D is a
D∗L N
constant bus density, so Nj j is the ratio between D and Ljj .
This formula is not absolutely accurate, but it is simple and
can be used as an estimation of the hop count. A large hop
count number will appear if the transmission quality of a road
segment is rather low. Routing algorithm prefers not to choose
them for the optimal route.
Now that we know the expected hop count for each road
segment, the total hop count for a certain route can be
calculated. Afterwards, the Dijkstra algorithm can be used to
select a shortest route with the minimal expected hop count.
Two implementations can be used. One is that the best route
consisting of a sequence of road segments is computed by the
source bus and is put into the packet header. The disadvantage
of this method is the increase of packet size and network
bandwidth cost. The other is each bus calculates the route
of each junction pairs and puts these information in a route
table. And the next road segment is chosen by checking the
route table when packet is near a junction . This scheme
requires less bandwidth. Our protocol MIRT uses the second
implementation.
Fig. 6. Route selection in MI-VANET
Figure 6 shows an example of how the next road segment
is selected. Once a bus receives a message from vehicle S, it
checks the route table. Considering the distance and expected
number of buses, the road segment with shadow will be chosen
as the next road segment.
When the next road segment is determined, the improved
greedy forwarding strategy can be used to forward packets
on the road segment. Each bus maintains a neighbor table in
which position, velocity and direction of each neighbor bus
are recorded. This table is updated through beacon messages
exchanged periodically. Thus, when a packet is received, the
forwarding bus computes the new predicted position of each
neighbor, and then greedily selects the next hop neighbor.
 VI. P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION
A. Simulation Model
In our experiments we use version 2.32 of the ns-2 simula-
tor. The simulated area is based on a real map from Southern
Beijing with a 1700m*1000m size, as shown in figure 2.
The vehicle movement trace is generated by VanetMobiSim,
which is a well known and validated traffic generator. Other
Fig. 8. Throughput of networks with 200 nodes
simulation parameters are listed in TABLE 1.
TABLE I To compare the throughput, we randomly select 50 com-
SIMULATION PARAMETERS
munication pairs. Each source node generates CBR traffic
for a period of 600 seconds with the sending rate from
Parameter Value 5kb/s to 30kb/s. As shown in figure 8, the throughput of
R1 150m
R2 400m
MI-VANET MIRT outperforms all the other protocols. The
bandwidth for both channel 2Mb throughput of MI-VANET MIRT is about twice that of VANET
beacon inerval 1.0s MIRT, the main reason is that the buses have another channel
Vehicle velocity 0-30m/s for transmission and has a larger communication range. In
Number of nodes 100-250
The bus percent 20% addition, the packet control overhead of MI-VANET MIRT is
TTL 32 small, because only the buses have to send beacon packets.
Packet size 512bytes
CBR data rate 128bytes/s VII. C ONCLUSION
Simulation time 600s In this paper, we have analyzed the unique features of urban
VANETs and proposed a two-tier VANET architecture called
Mobile Infrastructure Based VANET (MI-VANET). In MI-
We compare the performance of MIRT in MI-VANET
VANET architecture, the buses constitute a mobile backbone
architecture with GPSR in traditional VANET in both delivery
for data delivery, and the low tier is constituted by ordinary
ratio and throughput. Additionally, we also simulate MIRT
cars and passengers. MI-VANET will not only bring the
in traditional VANET called VANET MIRT and GPSR. In
benefit that ordinary cars do not have to forward packets
VANET MIRT, the route selection is the same as MI-VANET
for the others, but also improve the network connectivity.
MIRT. But different from MI-VANET, vehicles are equally in
Then the corresponding register method (MIRG) and routing
VANET MIRT, which means bus has only one interface and
algorithm (MIRT) for MI-VANET are also introduced. MIRT
all nodes are participating in packet forwarding.
is a geographical routing using the map topology and the bus
B. Simulation Results line information to facilitate route selection. Additionally, the
algorithmic complexity of MIRT is low.
In the simulation study, we demonstrate that our proposed
architecture with MIRT outperforms much better than GPSR
and VANET MIRT in terms of packet delivery ratio and
throughput.
As the future work, we will incorporate more realistic
factors into the protocol design for MI-VANET, such as the
real time or the history information of vehicle traffic.
R EFERENCES
[1] Chi-Fu Huang,Hung-Wei Lee and Yu-Chee Tseng. A Two-Tier Heteroge-
Fig. 7. The data delivery ratio in diffrent network density neous Mobile Ad Hoc Network Architecture and Its Load-Balance Routing
Problem. Mobile networks and applications, 2004
[2] Ian F.Akyildiz, Xudong Wang, and Weilin Wang. Wireless mesh networks:
As shown in figure 7, MI-VANET MIRT achieves the a survey. Computer Networks, 2005
highest packet delivery ratio. GPSR incurs a highest data loss [3] B. Karp and H.T.Kung. Gpsr: Greedy perimeter stateless routing for
wireless networks. MobiCom 2000: Proceedings of the 6th annual
rate, because simple greedy forwarding strategy without taking international conference on Mobile computing and networking, 2000.
urban environment characteristics into account is not suitable [4] M. Jerbi, S.-M. Senouci, R. Meraihi, and Y. Ghamri-Doudane. An im-
for VANET. After considering some urban environment char- proved vehicular ad hoc routing protocol for city environments. ICC’07.
IEEE International Conference on Communications, June 2007.
acteristics in VANET MIRT, 10-40% more packets can be [5] J. Härri, F. Filali, C. Bonnet, and M. Fiore. Vanetmobisim: generating
received. And our proposed architecture with MIRT achieves realistic mobility patterns for vanets. VANET ’06: Proceedings of the
10-25% gain in delivery ratio than VANET MIRT for the 3rd international workshop on Vehicular ad hoc networks, 2006.
[6] http://www.bjjtgl.gov.cn.
following reasons: as vehicles move like clusters and buses are [7] J. Wang and Wei Yan. Rbm: A role based mobility model for vanet. 2009
more uniformly distributed, increasing the bus communication International Conference on Communications and Mobile Computing, Jan
range can notably improve the network connectivity. 2009.