A dynamic route switching method for Inter-Vehicle networks

In the vehicular area networks (VANET), it is difficult to retain a long-life communication link because the topology changes quickly and the connection broken frequently. To have a stable communication link in VANETs, choosing a long lifetime routing path is more important than selecting a shortest one. In this paper, we proposed a dynamic route switching algorithm for interval-vehicle communication. Each vehicle maintains the life capacity of every possible route from source to itself. The proposed method gives up creating the shortest communication path between source and destination but builds a stable long-life route in them. In addition, it can automatically adjust the route when the destination responses the acknowledgement. Simulation results show that the proposed method cannot only prolong the lifetime of the connection between source and destination but also reduce the number of times to rebuild the connection. Without the restriction to select the shortest path, the additional number of hops in the route created by the proposed method is no more than 3. However, the prolonged lifetime of the connection is about five times of the shortest path methods.