A Route Protocol for Intelligent Connected Vehicle Convoy Communication Based on Node Lifecycle

Geographic routing in intelligent connected vehicle convoys is challenged by rapid topology changes, intermittent connectivity, and frequent route interruption. This paper presents IV-GPSR, a link-lifetime-aware extension of GPSR for intelligent connected vehicle convoys. It replaces the one-dimensional lifetime approximation with a geometric link-expiration estimate, normalizes forwarding progress, current-link lifetime, and local neighbor availability, and integrates the resulting score into the standard greedy perimeter store carry forward sequence while remaining local and stateless with respect to global topology. Independent MATLAB packet-level experiments show statistically significant packet delivery ratio (PDR) gains over GPSR of 2.48 percentage points at 160 vehicles and 15 m/s and 4.11 percentage points at 25 m/s. Aggregate throughput is approximately 1.63–1.74 Mbit/s, consistent with 512-byte packets at 3.5 packets/s, while control overhead remains near 31%. IV-GPSR does not significantly outperform optimized AFB-GPSR, AK-GPSR, or SD-GPSR proxies and incurs a small delay penalty relative to GPSR. A weight study shows that PDR is most sensitive to the lifetime coefficient; the best grid point is α = 0.10, β = 0.80, γ = 0.10, whereas the main experiments use α = 0.35, β = 0.50, γ = 0.15 for balanced contributions.