MURU: A Multi-Hop Routing Protocol for Urban Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are going to be an important communication infrastructure in our life. Because of high mobility and frequent link disconnection, it becomes quite challenging to establish a robust multi-hop path that helps packet delivery from the source to the destination. This paper presents a multi-hop routing protocol, called MURU, that is able to find robust paths in urban VANETs to achieve high end-to-end packet delivery ratio with low overhead. MURU tries to minimize the probability of path breakage by exploiting mobility information of each vehicle in VANETs. A new metric called expected disconnection degree (EDD) is used to select the most robust path from the source to the destination. MURU is fully distributed and does not incur much overhead, which makes MURU highly scalable for VANETs. The design is sufficiently justified through theoretical analysis and the protocol is evaluated with extensive simulations. Simulation results demonstrate that MURU significantly outperforms existing ad hoc routing protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio, packet delay and control overhead