Data congestion-aware routing for vehicular ad hoc networks in urban environments

Because of different characteristics, the performance of traditional mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) routing protocols is demonstrated poor in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Therefore, many routing protocols have been designed for VANETs during past few years. Most of these protocols utilized vehicular traffic to find optimal routing paths in urban environments. Although choosing the road segments with high vehicular traffic to construct routing paths can avoid path broken, it will incur a great amount of data traffic on these road segments, making serious packet loss due to packet collision. In this paper, we introduce an intersection-based routing protocol named data congestion-aware routing protocol (DCAR). The major difference between DCAR and other VANETs routing protocols is that DCAR takes the amount of data traffic, in addition to vehicular traffic, into consideration to construct routing paths. The performance evaluation of proposed protocol reveals significant improvement compared to existing VANETs routing protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio, throughput and number of sent packets per received packet.