Towards Efficient Geographic Routing in Urban Vehicular Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have received considerable attention in recent times. Multihop data delivery between vehicles is an important aspect for the support of VANET-based applications. Although data dissemination and routing have extensively been addressed, many unique characteristics of VANETs, together with the diversity in promising applications, offer newer research challenges. This paper introduces the improved greedy traffic-aware routing protocol (GyTAR), which is an intersection-based geographical routing protocol that is capable of finding robust and optimal routes within urban environments. The main principle behind GyTAR is the dynamic and in-sequence selection of intersections through which data packets are forwarded to the destinations. The intersections are chosen considering parameters such as the remaining distance to the destination and the variation in vehicular traffic. Data forwarding between intersections in GyTAR adopts an improved greedy carry-and-forward mechanism. Evaluation of the proposed routing protocol shows significant performance improvement in comparison with other existing routing approaches. With the aid of extensive simulations, we also validate the optimality and sensitivity of significant GyTAR parameters.