Weighted Probabilistic Next-hop Forwarder Decision-Making in VANET Environments

In VANET (Vehicular Ad Hoc NETwork), the act of transferring important information is a main concern in every routing protocol conception. Hence, selecting next packet relay is crucial decision for network performances. The highly dynamic topology of VANET which is result of the frequent changes in vehicles' positions, their speeds, and the unpredictable drivers' directions at intersections mostly lead to wrong packet forwarding decisions. To overcome the above mentioned countermeasure, we propose in this paper a GPSR-based routing protocol incorporating weighted link quality estimation, a probabilistic reception approximation, and moving direction. Based on vehicles' new coordinates and link status, our proposal called P-GPSR aims at selecting the most adequate relay node to smoothly disseminate messages between vehicles. This addition allows our proposal to significantly enhance the overall GPSR performances, more specifically, the packet delivery ratio and the end-to-end delay. Simulation experiments performed using NS2 simulator depict that our proposal outperforms both GPSR and GPSR-L in terms of throughput and packet delivery ratio without negatively affecting the end-to-end delay.