A fuzzy-based routing protocol for metropolitan-area mobile adhoc networks

In metropolitan-area mobile adhoc networks (M-MANET), such as in vehicular networks, nodes are not connected continuously. Some nodes are power limited, such as smartphones and laptops, and some nodes have high mobility. This harsh environment imposes networking challenges among the nodes. Routing is one of the critical networking problems that needs to be resolved. Using inexact and only locally measurable parameters, we need to find good packet routes that maximize their delivery probability and minimize the delivery costs. This motivates us to use fuzzy-logic as an inference system to solve the routing problem. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy-based routing protocol for M-MANET (FRPM). The protocol works in a hop-by-hop manner, which uses some locally measurable parameters to produce a decision either to select the contacting node as the next hop or not. We conducted simulation experiments using life scenarios of vehicles and pedestrians roaming in a downtown area of a city. We compared the proposed protocol, FRPM, with two practical protocols and a theoretical optimal one. Results show that FRPM, in addition to its ease of use, update and maintain, achieves better delivery ratio with less delivery cost and less energy consumption than the practical protocols.