Modeling Geographical Anycasting Routing in Vehicular Networks

Vehicular network is one of the most important subjects for researchers in recent years. Anycast routing protocols have many applications in vehicular ad hoc networks. The aim of an anycast protocol is sending packets to at least one of the receivers among candidate receivers. Studies done on anycast protocols over vehicular networks, however, have capability of implementation on some applications; they are partial, and application specific. No need to say that the lack of a comprehensive study, having a strong analytical background, is felt. Mathematical modeling in vehicular networks is difficult because the topology of these networks is dynamic. In this paper, it has been demonstrated that vehicular networks can be modeled based on time-expanded networks. The focus of this article is on geographical anycast. Three different scenarios were proposed including sending geographic anycast packet to exactly-one-destination, to at-least-one-destination, and to K-anycast destination, which can cover important applications of geographical anycast routing protocols. As the proposed model is of MILP type, a decentralized heuristic algorithm was presented. The evaluation process of this study includes the production of numerical results by Branch and Bound algorithm in general algebraic modeling system (GAMS) software and simulation of the proposed protocol in OMNET++ simulator. The comprehension of the result of proposed protocol and model shows that the applicability of this proposed protocol and its reactive conformity with the presented models based on presented metrics.