Improved Road Segment-Based Geographical Routing Protocol for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

The real-time traffic information dissemination among on-road vehicles has been envisioned via realizing vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) as smart service-oriented roadside wireless sensor networks. The network enables various types of real-time traffic applications related to safety and infotainment for drivers and passengers. The information dissemination-centric routing protocols for vehicular networks have to dynamically adopt under the constrained network environment while considering the higher mobility of vehicular nodes and unpredictable physical topologies in the network. The issue needs to be addressed through smart and network-aware routing protocols. Geographical routing protocols have witnessed significant attention for information dissemination under these types of dynamic vehicular network environment. To this end, this paper presents an improved road segment-based geographical routing (ISR) protocol focusing on better head node selection for information dissemination. It divides the forwarding area into a number of road segments and selects a head node on each segment by focusing on traffic-aware information including the location, direction, and link quality-centric score for every vehicle on each road segment. Algorithms were developed for the complete process of head node selection and information dissemination among vehicles on the road segments. The simulation results attested the performance benefits of the proposed routing framework as compared to the state-of-the-art protocols considering dynamic vehicular traffic environment-related metrics.