Reliable routing protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

A critical issue in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is the design of reliable routing protocols that are resistant to frequent path disruptions caused by vehicle motion. Therefore, in this paper we propose a routing protocol to identify more reliable paths by predicting the existence of candidate relay nodes when the link expiration time (LET) passes. If the vehicle cannot identify a candidate relay node (that is, if it realizes that a routing hole occurred on the current link), then the data is rerouted to a different block. Simulation results show that the proposed routing protocol reduces the frequency of route failures and data loss while maintaining low routing overhead. (C) 2010 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.