A performance evaluation of a context-aware path recommendation protocol for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

Many protocols and mechanisms have been proposed aiming to find an alternative path towards each targeted destination in downtown and urban areas. These protocols recommend the fastest path (i.e., least congested path) without considering the services or conditions of the recommended road segments. In this work, we propose a real-time, distributed, and context-aware path recommendation protocol. The proposed protocol considers the existence of special services at alternative road segments and guarantees a congestion-free level for each road segment that is located at a critical service (e.g., hospital, school, etc). Moreover, it considers the conditions of each traveled road segment (e.g., pot-holes, weather conditions, obstacles, etc), while recommending the path towards any targeted destination. We discuss and report on the performance of our protocol compared to other path recommendation and traffic congestion avoidance techniques, using an extensive set of scenarios and experiments implemented in NS-2.