Movement-aware alternative path routing protocol for vehicular multi-hop communications

Abstract

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are now considered to be suitable for enhancing road safety and efficiency in vehicular environment. Especially, due to the affluent spectrum resource, supports for non-safety relevant services, like inter-vehicle entertainments, are also under investigation. However, in the vehicular environments, the nodes can experience frequent link breakages due to the vehicle mobility characteristic. Thus, a reliable multi-hop routing protocols is definitely needed to overcome the performance degradation caused by it. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for non-safety applications, which is also referred as Movement-aware Alternative path Routing Protocol (MARP), a reactive unicast routing protocol that considers two factors such as vehicle movement and multi-path to determine the optimum reliable routing paths. In addition, we devote special attention to the random characteristic of the radio propagation model to provide a simulation with the desired level of realism. After realistic simulation studies, the performance of proposed MARP routing protocol outperforms the traditional VANETs routing by reducing the routing overhead and enhancing the stability of routing path.