A New Scalable Hybrid Routing Protocol for VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are highly mobile wireless networks that are designed to support vehicular safety, traffic monitoring, and other commercial applications. Within VANETs, vehicle mobility will cause the communication links between vehicles to frequently be broken. Such link failures require a direct response from the routing protocols, leading to a potentially excessive increase in the routing overhead and degradation in network scalability. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid location-based routing protocol that is particularly designed to address this issue. Our new protocol combines features of reactive routing with location-based geographic routing in a manner that efficiently uses all the location information available. The protocol is designed to gracefully exit to reactive routing as the location information degrades. We show through analysis and simulation that our protocol is scalable and has an optimal overhead, even in the presence of high location errors. Our protocol provides an enhanced yet pragmatic location-enabled solution that can be deployed in all VANET-type environments.