Critically Analysing Routing Protocols in a Vehicular Ad-hoc Network

Abstract

A Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is an application of a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET), which enables moving vehicles to connect with each other via wireless communications to improve road safety. In VANET, moving vehicles communicate with one another either directly through Vehicle-to-Vehicle, or indirectly through Vehicle-to-Infrastructure communication. However, designing effective and reliable routing protocols in VANET is complicated and presents challenging due to the unique characteristics such as rapid changes in topology, unstable connections and interruptions in path availability in VANET. Despite a number of routing protocols being utilised to serve a range of scenarios and topologies, gaps such as reliability, scalability, messages transmission overhead and latency remain in terms of contributing to and improving the routing protocols. In this paper, an overview of VANET is presented and various routing protocols are discussed, with their advantages and drawbacks. A comparison of routing protocols is presented with challenges and recommendations.