Self-Adaptive Delay-Bounded Routing Protocol for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a particular type of mobile ad hoc network in which vehicles communicate between themselves using wireless antenna. Due to unique characteristics of VANETs (e.g. high mobility of nodes and dynamic topology), routing is one of the challenging tasks in such networks. Consequently, delay tolerant networks which consider the disconnect nature of VANETs have attracted a great deal of attention from both industrial and research committees. However, existing delay tolerant proposals suffer from their traffic-unawareness deficiencies. Mainly, the multi-hop transmission preference of some existing solutions increases the network overhead and imposes extra delay for real-time traffic. In addition, some proposals cause inacceptable latency to data packets through prioritizing the carry-and-forward strategy. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a self-adaptive delay tolerant routing protocol which adjusts the routing decisions according to the traffic requirements and underlying network context. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed protocol improves the delivery rate of urgent packets up to 30% as well as keeps advantages of delay tolerant protocols.