Partial backwards routing protocol for VANETs

Abstract

The design and implementation of efficient routing protocols for highly dynamic networks such as Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) is a challenging task, due to the specific features of these networks such as rapid movements of nodes, frequent link disconnections and large scale networks. Efficient routing mechanisms need to adopt to the VANETs characteristics to achieve high routing performances. One alternative is the use of the traffic information in the routing process. In this paper, we propose a novel routing protocol called Partial Backwards Routing Protocol (PBRP), which consists of three integrated strategies: dissemination of road traffic information, partial forwarding algorithm and backwards recovery strategy working together to provide permanent and advanced information about vehicular traffic which widely helps the routing algorithm to stand up to dynamic changes of VANETs topology, and to bypass the local vision which is the drawback of GyTAR/EGyTAR protocols. Our proposed protocol has been developed over OMNET++ simulator, evaluated and compared with some other protocols. The simulation results show that the packet delivery ratio of our proposal is upper about 54% compared to GyTAR/EGyTAR and the end-to-end delay of our protocol is reduced by 75% for most of scenarios.