BIIR: A Beacon Information Independent VANET Routing Algorithm with Low Broadcast Overhead

Most of the existing VANET routing protocols rely on information collected from beacons for making routing decisions such as next neighbor selection. Beacons are very small size hello messages that each vehicle broadcasts periodically. Owing to very small payload size of beacons as compared to the payload size of a data message, they can easily pass through even very weak links, through which a data message could never pass. Therefore, the use of beacon information for making routing decisions in a highly dynamic scenario such as VANETs may cause selection of routes through which data message can never be sent. Several researchers have given solutions that do not use beacon information for making routing decisions. But most of these solutions incorporate a large number of broadcasts to forward the data packets, causing wastage of bandwidth. In this paper, we present a beacon information independent geographic routing algorithm called BIIR, which reduces the number of broadcasts to forward the data packets by making intelligent use of information collected by the vehicle during previous route discovery attempts for a destination. Our simulation results have shown that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing beacon less routing protocols in terms of the average number of broadcasts per data packet forwarding, packet delivery ratio and end to end delay experienced by the data messages.