ETAR: Efficient Traffic Light Aware Routing Protocol for Vehicular Networks

Routing in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) is an important factor to ensure a reliable and efficient delivery of data packets. In urban environments, routing protocols must efficiently handle the constantly changing network topology and frequent disconnections due to the high mobility and direction changes of vehicles. The challenge is greater when there are traffic lights fixed along intersections which affect directly the mobility and therefore can greatly impact routing in urban areas. In our previous work [1] we have proposed IRTIV (Intelligent Routing protocol using real time Traffic Information in urban Vehicular environment) that takes into account the real time traffic variation without any use of pre-installed infrastructures or additional messages. However, IRTIV does not take into consideration the traffic lights impact. In this paper, we propose ETAR (Efficient Traffic Light Aware Routing Protocol for Vehicular Networks). This protocol´s objective is to find the most stable path for delivering data packets based on traffic lights and traffic density of vehicles using the periodical exchange of Hello messages. We present simulation-based performance results, which show that the proposed protocol increases the packet delivery ratio and reduces the end-to-end delay.