Reliable intersection-based traffic aware routing protocol for urban areas vehicular ad hoc networks

Abstract

Nowadays, providing reliable vehicle to vehicle communications in vehicular ad hoc networks is essential to serve the emerging intelligent transportation systems. Traffic aware routing is considered a promising approach for delivering data packets between geographically separated vehicles. However, most of the existing traffic aware routing protocols greedily select the next-hop based on distance. Consequently, high packet loss ratio occurs especially with the vehicles high speed mobility. Some existing forwarding schemes attempted to improve the next-hop selection by considering inter-vehicle communication quality or neighbours predicted positions. Nevertheless, such schemes depend on the neighbours mobility information received through beacons regardless of its freshness. In addition, the differentiation between road and intersection areas while forwarding packets was neglected. Therefore, a reliable traffic aware routing protocol is proposed, which selects the next-hop based on roads structure, neighbours predicted positions and their received signal strength, and the recentness of the mobility information received from neighbours. The simulation results show significant improvements in terms of packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delays.