AN EXPERIMENTAL TESTBED PERFORMANCE EVALUATION FOR VEHICULAR AD HOC NETWORK (VANET)

Abstract

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are essential components of a smart city environment owing to some safety-enhancing applications. The use of VANETs extends from safety applications such as accident warning and collision avoidance to entertainment applications such as streaming video or comfort applications such as parking spot identification. Besides, these applications require interconnecting, for example, by enabling vehicles to communicate with other vehicles. Thus, the flow of information between different vehicles requires implementing a suitable transmission route. This paper aims to use VANETs to empower vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and V2I communication through a network that does not need infrastructure. In this paper, we propose to utilize proactive routing protocols such as OLSR, BATMAN, and BABEL and present their performance via a developed testbed. The performance is compared based on two different positionings, multi-hop, and full mesh, using metrics such as throughput and packet loss. The proposed approach demonstrates that BABEL outperforms both the OLSR and BATMAN in both positionings. This research highlights the need to select the appropriate routing protocol for VANETs and evaluate their performance, which will be significant for widespread deployment.