MEDAL: A moving direction and destination location based routing algorithm for vehicular ad hoc networks

Routing is a critical issue in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). This paper considers the routing issue in both vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) communications in VANETs, and proposes a Moving dirEction and DestinAtion Location based routing (MEDAL) algorithm for supporting V2V and V2I communications. MEDAL takes advantage of both the moving directions of vehicles and the destination location to select a neighbor vehicle as the next hop for forwarding data. Unlike most existing routing algorithms, it only uses a HELLO message to obtain or update routing information without using other control messages, which largely reduces the number of control messages used in routing. Simulation results show that MEDAL can significantly improve the packet delivery ratio of the network as compared with the well-known Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) algorithm.