Routing Mechanisms Analysis in Vehicular City Environment

The VANET are mainly characterized by the high nodes velocity, high nodes density at road intersections and traffic jams and severe radio signals degradation caused by obstacles present in the external environment. This make the direct application of routing protocols defined for MANET not suitable for VANET. In this paper we consider a simulation environment representing a real city map with its terrain characteristics and urban infrastructures and analyze the most common protocols developed for MANETs. The objective is to identify the appropriate and inappropriate routing strategies for vehicular networks. So, we examine the behavior of each protocol varying the vehicular density and the data traffic rate to determine the mechanisms that enable them to have a good efficiency and those that cause their performance degradation. The results show that when the effect of obstacles on the radio signals is ignored the reactive protocols outperform the proactive protocols while when the impact of the obstacles is taken into account, the results are almost similar.