The IoV enables drivers to obtain information on road conditions, accidents, and navigation. Applications in this framework collect information through message exchanges among vehicles. However, existing routing protocols in wireless sensor networks are not suitable for IoV due to the dynamically changing network topology. Furthermore, when the density of vehicles is sparse, it is difficult to achieve long-distance transmission for common routing protocols. In this article, we present a novel scheme that incorporates a community-aware mechanism to propagate data packets based on smartphones and vehicles. Cell connections via smartphones are incorporated to transmit data packets over long distances in this scheme. The process of searching usable smartphones is based on a community-aware mechanism. We use this to determine a contact list for each vehicle for long-distance transmission, thus significantly reducing the data packet delay. The small world feature is added to IoV by constructing communication relationships between smartphones. When a vehicle fails to forward messages, our scheme can quickly find another vehicle to replace it. Thus, the robustness of IoV is enhanced. We compare our protocol to CAR and GPSR. The simulation results show that our scheme outperforms these protocols in terms of data packet delays and the packet delivery ratio. © 1979-2012 IEEE.