Small-Scale and Large-Scale Routing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a highly mobile wireless ad hoc network that is targeted to support vehicular safety, traffic monitoring, and other applications. Mobility models used in traditional mobile ad hoc networks cannot directly be applied to VANETs since real-world factors such as road layouts and traffic regulations are not considered. In this paper, we propose a vehicular mobility model that reflects real-world vehicle movement and study the performance of packet-routing protocols. First, we study the routing in small-scale VANETs and propose two routing schemes: 1) connection-based restricted forwarding (CBRF) and 2) connectionless geographic forwarding (CLGF). With the insights obtained, we consider routing in large-scale VANETs. Since road complexity and traffic variety may cause many potential problems that existing routing protocols cannot address, we introduce a two-phase routing protocol (TOPO) that incorporates road map information. The proposed protocol defines an overlay graph with roads of high vehicular density and access graphs that are connected to the overlay. While in the overlay, packets are forwarded along a precalculated path. As far as access routing is concerned, we employ the aforementioned CBRF and CLGF schemes and send packets to the overlay or handle packets delivered from the overlay. We argue that the TOPO can serve as a framework that integrates existing VANET routing protocols. We also consider data diversity in VANETs and design the TOPO as an intelligent transportation system (ITS)-friendly protocol. To validate our design philosophy and the routing protocol, we use different areas in the city of Orlando, FL, and generate vehicular mobility traces, following our mobility models. We feed the traces to network simulators and study the routing behavior. Simulation results demonstrate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed routing protocols for large-scale VANET scenarios.