Ant Colony Optimization Based Delay-Sensitive Routing Protocol in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a multi-hop autonomous system that consists of vehicular nodes. VANETs aim to perform an efficient wireless communication in vehicular environments, and vehicular communication scenario is one of the typical high reliability and low delay scenarios in 5G networks. However, the special situations in VANETs like frequent link failure, unstable network topology and random change of vehicle mobility pose a number of challenges in routing protocol design. In this paper, we propose a delay sensitive routing protocol for VANETs to address these serious problems by using ant colony optimization (ACO) and we aim to find a path with a low average end-to-end delay from source to destination. We transform the next hop selection into a probability problem according to ACO concept. There are two mechanisms applied in routing discovery process which utilize pheromone information of transmission delay and heuristic information of vehicles. Two Mathematical models are proposed in pheromone deposit and evaporation prodecure to estimates transmission delay. Performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme has better performance.