Latency reduction in packet forwarding and beaconing in vehicular ad hoc networks

Abstract

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), is a special type of MANET in which vehicles can communicate with each other. One of the main limitations associated with this type of network is to deal with delay which is very crucial aspect. In VANETs, a proper maintenance of communication is cumbersome and topology is also not stable. Thus researchers relay more on geographical routing protocols than topology routing protocols. In geographical or position based routing protocols delay is still one of the main concerns. In this study, this problem (delay) has been addressed by introducing an efficient mechanism. In order to avail the objectives of this research, two ideas have been proposed. First, a packet forwarding method has been developed in order to reduce the latency of GeOpps routing protocol. Second, an efficient beaconing interval method has been developed by taking into account of the fuzzy logic approach on the basis of experimental results. In order to validate proposed methods, multiple experiments were carried out with different scenarios and then their outputs were compared with standard protocols. The results show that in the beaconing protocol, the use of proper parameters in fuzzy system can help to enhance the performance of the network in terms of load and also delay. Furthermore, applying the result of beaconing in GeOpps routing protocol caused it to perform better. The Modified GeOpps (MGeOpps), is associated with benefit of less processing in order to find the next node. Hence, it obtains good results in packet delivery ratio and less delay in packet transmission. The overall end-to-end delay is 2% less than the GeOpps routing protocol.