MAC layer based cross-layer solutions for VANET routing: A review

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET's) are gaining popularity in research community with every passing year due to the key role they play in Intelligent Transportation System. Their primary objective is to provide safety, but their potential to offer a variety of user-oriented services makes them more attractive. The biggest challenge in providing all these services is the inherent characteristics of VANET itself such as highly dynamic topology due to which maintaining continuous communication among vehicles is extremely difficult. Here comes the importance of routing solutions which traditionally are designed using strict layered architecture but fail to address stringent QoS requirements. The paradigm of cross-layer design for routing has shown remarkable performance improvements. This paper aims to highlight routing challenges in VANET, limitations of single-layer solutions and presents a survey of cross-layer routing solutions that utilize the information from the MAC layer to improve routing performance in VANET.