A novel opportunistic routing protocol applied to vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) applied to specific scenarios are kinds of opportunistic networks. Introducing currently opportunistic routing protocols and actual VANETs characteristics, the paper proposed an opportunistic routing protocol based on the comprehensive utilities of forwarding nodes. The protocol conducted a dimensionless method to deal with these factors including the distance between the forwarding and the destination, the direction arriving the destination, the forwarding velocity vector and traffic conditions. It adopted an eigenvector method to determine each factor weight, and used a weighted sums method to compose each effect factor. In routing process, the node would select the highest utility node to propagate packets. It would use a store-carry-forward strategy to transmit packets in spare networks. By means of the NCTUns on the basis of the electronic map of Lanzhou, simulating the working process of the new routing protocol and the testing results indicate that the protocol could apply better to various actual VANETs scenarios.