ERP: An efficient reactive routing protocol for dense vehicular ad hoc networks

Authors: THANDAPANY SIVAKUMAR, RAJENDIRAN MANOHARAN

Abstract: A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a type of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) that provides an exchange of messages between vehicles. VANETs encourage researchers to create safety and comfort applications that will lead to intelligent transport systems. Conventional ad hoc routing methods may cause flooding of packets to find routes in a VANET. Hence, finding a route from the source to the destination vehicle by local broadcast techniques in densely populated urban areas may create a broadcast storm and network bandwidth is unnecessarily wasted to discover routes between source and destination vehicles. In this paper, an efficient routing protocol (ERP) is proposed to utilize the network bandwidth efficiently by avoiding unnecessary rebroadcast. This new protocol finds a minimum connected dominating set of vehicles (MCDSV) and treats them as a virtual backbone for communication in VANETs. Vehicles in the virtual backbone act as forwarders and are responsible for local broadcasting in the network. Vehicles that are not in the MCDSV are not allowed to broadcast packets as forwarders and hence the bandwidth utilization is minimized. The proposed protocol has been implemented in NS2 and its performance is compared with other routing protocols for packet delivery ratio, control overhead ratio, and average end-to-end delay.

Keywords: Minimum connected dominating set of vehicles, vehicular ad hoc networks, unicast routing

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