LSGO: Link State aware Geographic Opportunistic routing protocol for VANETs

Robust and efficient data delivery in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) with high mobility is a challenging issue due to dynamic topology changes and unstable wireless links. The opportunistic routing protocols can improve the reliability of routing by making full use of the broadcast characteristics and assist in data transmission through additional backup links. In this paper, we propose a Link State aware Geographic Opportunistic routing protocol (LSGO) which exploits a combination of geographic location and the link state information as the routing metric. The LSGO aims to improve the reliability of data transmission in a highly dynamic environment, which selects the forwarders and prioritizes them based on the vehicle's geographic location and the link's quality. We compare the performance of LSGO with GpsrJ + which removes the unnecessary stop at a junction and greedy traffic aware routing protocol (GyTAR) using network simulator ns-2. The simulation results show that it opens more nodes to participate in the opportunistic data forwarding and increases a connection's throughput while using no more network capacity than traditional routing. In the simulation, compared with other two protocols, when the number of vehicles and the average vehicle velocity increase, LSGO's packet dropping rate is reduced and the network throughput is improved.