Performance analysis of routing protocols for vehicle safety communications on the freeway

In a freeway vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) environment, an efficient ad hoc routing protocol plays a very important role to enhance the safety of passengers. This paper presents the latest result of simulation model of three mobile ad hoc routing protocols: destination-sequenced distance-vector protocol (DSDV), dynamic source routing (DSR) and ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV). The performance of three protocols under constant bit rate traffic is evaluated and compared with five quality indices. The simulation results show that both the reactive routing protocols, DSR and AODV, have better performance than the proactive routing protocol DSDV. DSDV has largest packet loss rate and smallest system throughput among the three protocols. This paper also shows that the effect of varying mobility has undeniably influenced the performance of both reactive routing protocols. DSR is better in the protocol overhead than AODV. However, there is critical jitter variation in the DSR. As a whole, AODV is more appropriate than DSR for the freeway VANET.