An enhancement to AODV protocol for efficient routing in VANET - A cluster based approach

Abstract

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) are a special kind of Mobile Ad-hoc network (MANET), in which vehicles on the road forms the nodes of the networks. Now a days, VANETs find several applications as an Intelligent Transportation System. Dynamic network architectures and node movement characteristics differentiates VANETs from other kinds of ad hoc networks. Since VANETs have a dynamic network topology, routing in VANETs are complicated. Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol is the most commonly used topology based routing protocol for VANET. During the route discovery process AODV broadcasts route request message (RREQ). It creates many unused routes between a source and a destination node. This paper aims at improving the performance of AODV by enhancing the existing protocol by creating stable clusters and performing routing by Cluster Heads and Gateway nodes. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.