Available Bandwidth-Aware Routing in Urban Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Vehicular communication for intelligent transportation systems will provide safety, comfort for passengers, and more efficient travels. This type of network has the advantage to warn drivers of any event occurred in the road ahead, such as traffic jam, accidents or bad weather. This way, the number of traffic accidents may decrease and many lives could be saved. Moreover, a better selection of non-congested roads will help to reduce pollution. Some other interesting services, such as downloading of multimedia services, would be possible and available through infrastructure along the roadside. Providing multimedia services over VANETs may require a QoS-aware routing protocol that often need to estimate available resources. In this paper, we study the performance, in realistic VANET urban scenarios, of an extension of AODV that includes the available bandwidth estimator ABE. AODV-ABE establishes forwarding paths that satisfy the bandwidth required by the applications. The results, obtained on the NCTUns simulator, show that AODV-ABE could be used in urban-VANETs where vehicles´ speed is moderate.