A routing protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks using simulated annealing algorithm and neural networks

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is special type of mobile ad hoc networks which establish communications between adjacent vehicles and also between vehicles and roadside units. Thanks to their dynamic and fast topology changes, inter-vehicular ad hoc networks are like dynamic networks without organizations. Hence, developing a reliable routing algorithm is regarded as a notable challenge in these networks. In this paper, a clustering-based reliable routing algorithm was proposed for VANETs with reliable applications. In this way, simulated annealing was used for appropriate clustering of nodes and the parameters of node degree, coverage and ability were considered in the proposed method. For selecting cluster head, radial basis function neural network was used and a suitable fitness function with velocity and free buffer size parameters was used. Each cluster has two gateway nodes which are used as the communication interface for transmitting data from one cluster to another cluster. The simulation results indicated the efficiency of the proposed method in terms of route discovery rate and packet delivery rate.