Opportunistic geographical routing in VANETs based on road segmentation on highways

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is a novel technology to improve the safety of transportation systems and passenger convenience. Considering the special characteristics of these networks, geographic opportunistic routing has a better chance of delivering the packets more efficiently than the other traditional routing protocols. However, most of the geographic opportunistic routing protocols employ beacon packets in the whole area of the network to obtain the location information of the neighbors and destination which not only cause collisions among the data and beacon packets, but also decrease the performance of the routing protocols significantly. In this paper, a Segmentation-centric Geographic Opportunistic Routing (SGOR) protocol is proposed which instead of employing criterion of packet advancement to the destination it uses a novel criterion named Local Packet Advancement (LPA). By applying the proposed criterion, data packets can be delivered efficiently without requiring location information of the neighbors and destinations. Moreover, SGOR protocol has superior performance compared to the Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPRS) protocols even without using any control packets.