A RELIABILITY-BASED ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR VEHICULAR AD-HOC NETWORKS

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs), an emerging technology, would allow vehicles to form a self-organized network without the aid of a permanent infrastructure. As a prerequisite to communication in VANETs, an efficient route between communicating nodes in the network must be established, and the routing protocol must adapt to the rapidly changing topology of vehicles in motion. This is one of the goals of VANET routing protocols. In this thesis, we present an efficient routing protocol for VANETs, called the Reliable Inter-VEhicular Routing (RIVER) protocol. RIVER utilizes an undirected graph that represents the surrounding street layout where the vertices of the graph are points at which streets curve or intersect, and the graph edges represent the street segments between those vertices. Unlike existing protocols, RIVER performs real-time, active traffic monitoring and uses this data and other data gathered through passive mechanisms to assign a reliability rating to each street edge. The protocol then uses these reliability ratings to select the most reliable route. Control messages are used to identify a node’s neighbors, determine the reliability of street edges, and to share street edge reliability information with other nodes

Spatial and Traffic-Aware Routing (STAR) for Vehicular Systems

Vehicular ad hoc networks are studied with increasing interest for the many possible applications they have. Equipping vehicles with wireless devices primarily allows to design protocols and mechanisms to improve street safety. But also distributed applications for cooperative work, fleet management, passengers entertainment, could be supported. However, novel network protocols must be designed to make the deployment of vehicular networks possible. In this paper we consider the problem of data routing. We propose a novel position-based routing algorithm that is able to exploit both street topology information achieved from geographic information systems and information about spatial distribution of vehicles along street and vehicular traffic, in order to perform accurate routing decisions. The algorithm has been implemented in the NS-2 simulation environment and its performance has been compared with three other algorithms proposed in the literature