ENHANCEMENT OF AODV ROUTING PROTOCOL PERFORMANCE VIA MODIFYING ROUTE MAINTENANCE PHASE MECHANISM

Vehicular Network (VANET)) is facing a lot of considerable issues affecting the network's performance. Factors like the massive number of nodes lacking inherent organization, also fast and frequent topological changes, makes routing one of the challenging tasks in VANET. In this paper, a new routing mechanism is developed to modify the operation's technique of AODV routing protocol to be used effectively in VANETs. The new mechanism of the modified AODV protocol (UAODV) is based on the idea of reducing the overhead of the protocol through the prevention of the broken link's predecessor node from the initiation and sending of the RERR toward the source node and after that, begins the procedure of the generation of a new message of the RREQ for repairing broken link rather than source node. Our developed mechanism illustrates that the UAODV protocol outperforms the original AODV in vehicular network environments. The results, which are verified by comparison with available experimental data, demonstrated that the average overhead of the UAODV has been reduced by 11.72% compared to original AODV. In addition to that, the number of the lost packets has been reduced by 31.90% and the transmission time for the packets has been decreased by 42.28% compared to original AODV. The proposed mechanism effectiveness evaluation is confirmed by comparing the efficiency of UAODV to the efficiency of the original AODV under different nodes mobility speed as well as different network load. The updated protocol (UAODV) improves the efficiency of the network by decreasing bandwidth consumption by protocol overhead.