HIVM: A RESPONSIVE VANET ROUTING ALGORITHM FOR SCALABLE COMMUNICATION IN REAL-TIME VEHICULAR ENVIRONMENT

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) is a type of ad hoc network whereby its nodes are represented by vehicle. It originated from the desire to ensure drivers comfort and safety in road transportation so as to reduce the risk of accidents on our roads. VANETs have some unique features that make it different from MANETs such as characteristics, architecture, applications and challenges. VANET offers promising applications and hence requires efficient and adequate routing protocol for these applications to be achieved. Existing protocols attempt to resolve the issue of routing at the intersection, however, additional delay and increased path length is incurred as a result of forwarding packet to its destination. The decision taken by the decision making node is aimed at improving routing performance by reducing the delay and average path length for a packet to get to its destination. This research work proposed a routing protocol called High Inter-Vehicular Mobility Protocol which creates paths composed of number of roads intersections by leveraging real-time traffic information and hence ensuring high probability of network connectivity. At the intersections, the decision making vehicle uses prior knowledge information of vehicular traffic to make critical routing decisions by intelligently selecting the optimum routes to reach the desired destination. Network Simulator NS-2.35 and VanetMobiSim were used to evaluate the performance of HIVM protocol. The experiments varied Constant Bit Rate (CBR) from 0.5 to 5 packet/sec over node densities of 100, 150, and 200 and also varied vehicular speed from 25Km/hr to 65Km/hr over same node densities. The performance metrics that was used for the simulation were average delay, packet delivery ratio (PDR), and average path length. Simulation results show that HIVM performs better than ERBA, ReTARS, RBVT-R, LOUVRE, and GyTAR.