A New AODV Based Forecasting Link Breakage Indicator for VANETs

Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) have an extremely dynamic nature, which leads to unstable connectivity between nodes. Link failures may occur at any time and cause packets loss. Several routing protocols tackle this issue by supplying mechanisms to detect route failures. The aim is to seek an alternative route before the current one becomes unavailable. In this paper, we propose an enhancement of the AODV routing protocol. We substitute AODV's route breakage detection system with a link breakage forecasting indictor (LBFI). LBFI is based on information derived from the OFDM (Orthogonal frequencydivision multiplexing) packet decoding process that are combined with Dempster-Shafer belief theory. Once an upcoming link failure is detected, the route maintenance process starts. We evaluate this new routing protocol called LBFI-AODV, by comparing it to AODV using the NS3 network simulator. Results obtained reveal that LBFI-AODV's efficiency is significantly improved providing both higher packet delivery ratio (PDR) and lower end-to-end delay (E2ED).

I. Introduction

Recently, the automobile industry has experienced considerable evolution thanks to wireless communication technologies that enable communication between terminals at any time and from any position. This also enables data to be shared between moving terminals. Hence, the idea of Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) has emerged, creating a lot of perspectives in the development of safety, security and entertainment applications. VANETs are ephemeral networks where several moving vehicles enter into contact with each other by the mean of wireless medium to exchange useful data. As the nodes in VANETs are extremely mobile, traditional routing protocols cannot deal with the variations of VANETs' network topology. Furthermore, enabling the connection between nodes and data-flow between the source and the destination nodes, requires the development of robust routing protocols that ensure efficiency and quality of service as well as a high packet delivery rate.