A loss-tolerant scheme for unicast routing in VANETs using network coding

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), designing an efficient routing protocol is particularly challenging due to the vehicle movement and lossy wireless channel. A packet can be lost at a forwarder node even when a proper node is selected as the forwarder. In this paper, we propose a loss-tolerant scheme for unicast routing protocols in VANETs. The proposed scheme uses multiple forwarder nodes to improve the packet reception ratio at the forwarders. The scheme uses network coding to reduce the number of required transmissions, resulting in a significant improvement of end-to-end packet delivery ratio without increasing the message overhead. We show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme by using both theoretical analysis and computer simulations.