Coupling cellular communication networks with vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) can be a very interesting way out for providing Internet access to vehicles in the road. However, due to the several specific characteristics of VANETs, making an efficient multi-hop routing from vehicular sources to the Internet gateways through Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology is still challenging. In this paper, an Internet mobile gateway selection scheme is proposed to elect more potential vehicles to behave as gateways to Internet in VANETs. Therefore, the discovery and the selection of route to those mobiles gateways is carried out via an efficient multiple metrics-based relay selection mechanism. The objective is to select the more reliable route to the mobile gateways, by reducing the communication overhead and performing seamless handover. The proposed protocol is compared with one recent protocol based on packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay and overhead. The results show that the proposed protocol ameliorates significantly the network performance in the contrast of the other protocol.

翻译：将蜂窝通信网络与车载自组织网络（VANET）相结合，是为道路车辆提供互联网接入的一种极具潜力的方案。然而，由于VANET具有多种特殊特性，如何通过长期演进（LTE）技术实现从车载信源到互联网网关的高效多跳路由仍然充满挑战。本文提出一种互联网移动网关选择方案，旨在从VANET中筛选出更具潜力的车辆作为互联网网关。为此，通过一种基于多度量指标的可靠中继选择机制，实现对移动网关的路由发现与选择。该机制的目标是降低通信开销并实现无缝切换，从而选择更可靠的移动网关路由。本文将所提协议与一种基于数据包投递率、平均端到端时延及开销的现有协议进行对比。结果表明，相较于对比协议，所提协议在网络性能方面有显著提升。