FGWSO‐TAR: Fractional glowworm swarm optimization for traffic aware routing in urban VANET

In mobile distributed applications, such as traffic alert dissemination, dynamic route planning, file sharing, and so on, vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) has emerged as a feasible solution in recent years. However, the performance of the VANET depends on the routing protocol in accord with the delay and throughput requirements. Many of the routing protocols have been extensively studied in the literature. Although there are exemptions, they escalate research challenges in traffic aware routing (TAR) protocol of VANET. This paper introduces the fractional glowworm swarm optimization (FGWSO) for the TAR protocol of VANET in an urban scenario that can identify the optimal path for the vehicle with less traffic density and delay time. The proposed FGWSO searches the optimal routing path based on the fitness function formulated in this paper. Fractional glowworm swarm optimization is the combination of the GWSO and fractional theory. Moreover, exponential weighted moving average is utilized to predict the traffic density and the speed of the vehicle, which is utilized as the major constraints in the fitness function of the optimization algorithm to find the optimal traffic aware path. Simulation of FGWSO shows the significant improvement with a minimal end‐to‐end delay of 6.6395 seconds and distance of 17.3962 m, respectively, in comparison with the other existing routing approaches. The simulation also validates the optimality of the proposed TAR protocol.