A link state aware geographic routing protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks

Abstract

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), the communication links are inherently unstable due to vehicles’ mobility and various impairment of radio signal. Existing geographic routing protocols often choose the next hop according to the greedy forwarding, regardless of the link’s quality and transmission reliability. The successful packet delivery rate is decreased in non-ideal communication links. Consequently, the reliability of data transmission is worse and the network throughput is declined. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol called link state aware geographic routing protocol (LSGR) for VANETs. In LSGR, a routing metric called expected one-transmission advance (EOA) is contrived to improve the greedy forwarding algorithm by explicitly incorporating the link state and packet’s advance. Routing with the EOA metric, one can improve the transmission efficiency by diminishing transmission failures. Simulation results show that LSGR can achieve a higher throughput and packet delivery rate than the geographic routing protocols that adopt the traditional greedy forwarding.