SDR: A Stable Direction-Based Routing for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

A stable and reliable routing mechanism for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is an important step toward the provision of long data transmission applications, such as file sharing and music download. Traditional mobile ad hoc network (MANET) routing protocols are not suitable for VANET because the mobility model and environment of VANET are different from those of traditional MANET. To solve this problem, we proposed a new stable routing algorithm, called stable directional forward routing. The novelty of the proposed routing protocol is its combining direction broadcast and path duration prediction into ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing protocols, which including: (1) Nodes in VANET are grouped based on the position, only nodes in a given direction range participating in the route discovery process to reduce the frequency of flood requests, (2) Route selection is based on the link duration while not the hops or other metrics to increase the path duration, (3) Route discovery is executed before the path expiration in order to decrease the end to end delay. The performance of the new scheme is evaluated through extensive simulations with Qualnet. Simulation results indicate the benefits of the proposed routing strategy in terms of decreasing routing control packet, reducing the number of link-breakage events, improving the packet delivery ratio and decreasing the end-to-end delay.