Routing Protocol of Sparse Urban Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an application of mobile ad hoc technology in transportation systems, it has become an important part of ITS. Since multi-hop link is hard to set up in sparse VANET, a traffic-aware routing (TAR) protocol is proposed which estimates vehicle average neighbors (VAN) of roads by exchanging beacon messages between encounter vehicles. Road with high VAN is preferred to be selected as part of forwarding path at intersection. Packets are forwarded to the next intersection in road in a greedy manner. Simulations show that TAR outperforms the compared protocols in terms of both packet delivery ratio and average end-to-end delay.