A Bipolar Traffic Density Awareness Routing Protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

To support an increasing amount of various new applications in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), routing protocol design has become an important research challenge. In this paper, we propose a Bipolar Traffic Density Awareness Routing (BTDAR) protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks. The BTDAR aims at providing reliable and efficient packets delivery for dense and sparse vehicle traffic network environments. Two distinct routing protocols are designed to find an optimal packet delivery path in varied vehicular networks. In dense networks, a link-stability based routing protocol is designed to take vehicles connectivity into consideration in its path selection policy and maximize the stability of intervehicle communications. In sparse networks, a min-delay based routing protocol is proposed to select an optimal route by analyzing intermittent vehicle connectivity and minimize packets delivery latency. Intervehicles connectivity model is analyzed. The performance of BTDAR is examined by comparisons with three distinct VANET routing protocols. Simulation results show that the BTDAR outperforms compared counterpart routing protocols in terms of packet delivery delay and packet delivery ratio.