A Novel Reliable Routing Scheme for VANETs

Intelligent transportation systems based on 802.11 standards family have a remarkable potential to improve safety and efficiency of road traffic. Owing to high mobility of vehicles, stability of routing in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) is a challenging issue, especially in case of multi-hop communications. Example techniques available in the literature to increase reliability of routing include e. g., the concept of multipath end-to-end transmission. However, they are not capable of providing continuity of transmission in the presence of failures of all alternate paths occurring in a short period of time. To solve this problem, we propose a new multipath routing algorithm that starts the alternate path selection process immediately after a failure affecting any of multiple end-to-end link-disjoint transmission paths (i.e., not waiting for failure of all alternate paths). Path stability is additionally increased by means of a special metric based on the difference between the respective movement vectors of any two vehicles forming possible links. Simulation results clearly show that our approach is able provide continuity of multi-hop end-to-end VANET communications in the presence of link failures.