An Efficient Routing Protocol Using an Improved Distance-Based Broadcasting and Fuzzy Logic System for VANET

Abstract

The high mobility and frequent changes in the network topology remain a great divergence between Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) and Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET). This makes existing routing protocols for MANET imperfect for a VANET environment. In order to ensure good data transmission between vehicles, it is mandatory to improve these protocols to this new environment. Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) is one of the most proposed reactive protocols in the literature for MANET, but its direct application in VANET returns poor performance results. In this paper, we propose an Efficient Routing Protocol using an improved Distance-Based Broadcasting and Fuzzy Logic System (ERPFL), which is an extension of the AODV routing protocol. In the first, the proposed scheme uses an improved Distance-Based Broadcasting method in route discovery process. Each vehicle selects the most suitable neighbours to send a route request, using different mobility parameters such as distance, velocity and direction. Then, the destination vehicle selects the best route from the most reliable routes received, using the Fuzzy Logic System. Link Expiration Time and Link Reliability Model are considered input metrics for this system. The simulation results show that ERPFL saves network bandwidth resources which contributes to a higher data transmission ratio. In addition, our proposed protocol efficiently distributes data packets, decreases the hop count and reduces network routing time.