Mobile data offloading in urban VANETs on top of a virtualization layer

© 2015 IEEE. The growth of mobile data traffic is urging on the development of mechanisms to route cellular traffic through alternative networks. In this paper, we present an approach to do mobile data offloading from/to vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), grounded on a virtualization layer and a new routing protocol on top of it. The virtualization layer deals with the issues derived from the mobility of the vehicles, offering the view of a network of stationary virtual nodes. In turn, the routing protocol puts forward a new combination of topological and geographical routing, which can consistently achieve better performance than state-of-the-art approaches to VANET routing in simulations of urban scenarios with different vehicle densities.