Multiobjective Optimized Routing Protocol for VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) routing protocols have been attracting a considerable attention of both research and industrial communities, due to their significant role in intelligent transportation system applications. The present paper adopts an optimized integrated multicast, multicriteria, adaptive route lifetime as a routing protocol for VANETs. Whereby only an optimal subset of neighbor vehicles is chosen to relay route request (RREQ) messages based on distance, direction, speed, and future direction information in a combined sender-receiver manner. Among those selected optimal paths for route discovery, the best route with lowest cost will be chosen for forwarding data packets for a specified duration assigned depending on the obtained cost and number of intermediate vehicles of that route. Fuzzy controllers were employed to assess routes' costs and their lifetimes. Furthermore, artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm was used to concurrently optimize all used fuzzy systems and obtain the optimal highest rank of links' cost values within which the neighbors could be selected as relay nodes in route discovery process. Simulation results prove that the proposed routing scheme significantly improves the network performance in both urban and highway scenarios, under different situations of vehicle density.