Predictive multi-hop stable routing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The past few years have observed vehicular networks becoming increasingly important in order to exchange information between stationary or moving vehicles. The information exchanged can range from warning messages in case of accidents that have occurred on the road and traffic jams to guiding the vehicles about the most efficient path to reach their destination. The biggest challenge, a vehicular network routing protocol faces, is providing a stable packet delivery mechanism. The proposed PMH protocol aims at providing a high packet delivery ratio by selecting each next node (vehicle) in the path from the source to the destination based on a parameter called the Disconnection Probability Metric (DPM). The DPM mainly represents the link breakage probability between nodes and the node with the least DPM is selected as the next node. Moreover, the PMH protocol also calculates the predicted link lifetime based on which it initiates the route selection algorithm before the weakest link actually breaks. This mechanism further enhances the usefulness of the algorithm as there is lesser control overhead to overcome link breakage.