Packet forwarding based on reachability information for VANETs

Abstract

In the VANET, where the duration of communication is extremely short, the large amount of control overheads associated with discovering and maintaining end-to-end path information may not be tolerable. This paper presents a new multi-hop forwarding protocol which does not use explicit path information, but instead, uses reachability information towards the destinations in determining next-hop nodes. The reachability information for a particular node merely indicates that the node is reachable. At each hop, one of the neighbor nodes which hold the reachability information towards the same destination is selected as the next-hop node by contention based on some priority values. The proposed protocol is designed to be integrated with the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol in order to achieve higher efficiency and accuracy in its time-critical operations. It is shown through simulations that the proposed protocol outperforms the AODV in a realistic the VANET scenario in terms of both the end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.