Vehicular networks are formed by vehicles communicating in an ad hoc manner or through cellular and IEEE 802.11 base stations. Routing in vehicular networks is challenging due to highly dynamic network topologies. Previous research done at the UbiNetS lab at NJIT has proposed the idea of Road-Based using Vehicular Traffic information (RBVT) routing. In RBVT, routes are sequences of road intersections, and geographical forwarding is used for sending packets between the intersections.
This thesis proposes two proactive RBVT protocols (RBVT-P and RBVT-PS) for city-based Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs). RBVT-P is a completely distributed protocol that unicasts connectivity packets in the network to find the road- based topology graph. This graph represents a real-time view of the roads with enough vehicular traffic to ensure connectivity between intersections and is disseminated to all nodes. RBVT-PS uses a similar concept, but the road connectivity information is gathered and sent separately to a server via cellular links The server centrally computes the connectivity graph and disseminates it to the nodes in the network.
The proposed protocols are compared against existing routing protocols. Simulation results for city scenarios show that both RBVT-P and RBVT-PS perform better than the existing protocols, with reduction in end-to-end delay as much as 85% and increase in delivery ratio as much three times. RBVT-PS reduces the delay three times and increases the delivery ratio by 10% when compared with RBVT-P
