Adaptively prioritizing candidate forwarding set in opportunistic routing in VANETs

Opportunistic routing (OR) paradigms in vehicular networks via opportunistic candidate set selection have a better performance over the pre-defined next-hop node in terms of packet delivery rate. Nevertheless, uneven vehicle distribution, highly dynamic topology, varying link interference, and bandwidth restrictions impose drastic challenges for satisfying applications requirements in static prioritizing candidate set selection policies. Besides, fulfilling quality of service (QoS) requirements of heterogeneous applications, due to the limited local topology perspective and many involving conflicting routing criteria, will be further compromised. Considering the candidate set selection policy as a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) task, an adaptive two-hop cooperative forwarding set selection strategy called APFS is proposed in this paper. By developing a local to-pology perspective to the two-hop neighbor information, the APFS scheme jointly considers indicators of link stability, delay assessment, and link good-put as routing criteria. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods are employed in two different scenarios in prioritizing candidate forwarding sets. First, classical AHP-TOPSIS technique with a mutable pair-wise comparison matrix is applied, and then Neutrosophic Set (NS) is combined with the classical AHP-TOPSIS method to handle ambiguous vehicular environments. The simulation results show that the APFS strategy using both prioritization policies have significantly improved the performance of packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, throughput, and hop counts as compared to other schemes.