A Cluster Based Enhancement to AODV for Inter-Vehicular Communication in VANET

Abstract

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) are a special kind of Mobile Ad-hoc network (MANET), in which vehicles on the road forms the nodes of the networks. Now a days, VANETs find several applications as an Intelligent Transportation System(ITS). Dynamic network architectures and node movement characteristics differentiates VANETs from other kinds of ad hoc networks. The dynamic change in topology shortens the effective time of routing. Hence routing in VANETs is complicated. Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol is the most commonly used topology based routing protocol for VANET. During the route discovery process AODV broadcasts route request message (RREQ). It creates many unused routes between a source and a destination node. This paper aims at improving the performance of AODV by enhancing the existing protocol by creating stable clusters and performing routing by Cluster Heads and Gateway nodes.