Efficient Mechanisms and Performance Analysis of Routing Protocols in VANETs for Realistic Scenarios

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are considered as a special case of mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) and are recently gaining a great attention from the research community. The need for improved road safety, traffic efficiency and direct communication along with the great complexity in routing, makes VANETs a highly challenging field. Routing in VANETs has to adapt to special characteristics such as high speed and road pattern movement as well as high linkage break probability. In this work, the authors show that traditional MANET routing protocols cannot efficiently handle the challenges in a VANET environment and thus need further modifications. For this reason, they propose and implement an enhancement mechanism, applied to the GPSR routing protocol that adapts to the needs of a VANET. The proposed mechanism's performance is evaluated through simulation sets for urban and highway scenarios and compared to the performance of the most common MANET routing protocols adopted in VANETs. The proposed enhancement is shown to be considerably beneficial and it significantly outperforms the rest of the tested routing protocols for almost every topology setting.