Elsevier

Computer Networks

Volume 56, Issue 17, 30 November 2012, Pages 3795-3807
Computer Networks

RIVER: A reliable inter-vehicular routing protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2012.08.017Get rights and content

Abstract

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs), an emerging technology, would allow vehicles on roads to form a self-organized network without the aid of a permanent infrastructure. As a prerequisite to communication in VANETs, an efficient route between communicating nodes in the network must be established, and the routing protocol must adapt to the rapidly changing topology of vehicles in motion. This is one of the goals of VANET routing protocols. In this paper, we present an efficient routing protocol for VANETs, called the Reliable Inter-VEhicular Routing (RIVER) protocol. RIVER utilizes an undirected graph that represents the surrounding street layout where the vertices of the graph are points at which streets curve or intersect, and the graph edges represent the street segments between those vertices. Unlike existing protocols, RIVER performs real-time, active traffic monitoring and uses these data and other data gathered through passive mechanisms to assign a reliability rating to each street edge. The protocol then uses these reliability ratings to select the most reliable route. Control messages are used to identify a node’s neighbors, determine the reliability of street edges, and to share street edge reliability information with other nodes.

Introduction

The vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) provides the ability for vehicles to spontaneously and wirelessly network with other vehicles nearby for the purposes of providing travelers with new features and applications that have never been previously possible. Within this ever-changing network, messages must be passed from vehicle to vehicle in order to reach their intended destination. To participate in such a network, a routing protocol must direct these message transfers in an efficient manner to ensure robust data communication. Bernsen et al. [3], discuss various design factors of VANET protocols, surveyed a number of VANET routing protocols, and presented an analysis of them.

As a special class of mobile ad hoc networks, VANETs have their own unique characteristics that distinguish them as a subset of this larger class. Most nodes in a VANET are mobile, but because vehicles are generally constrained to roadways, they have a distinct controlled mobility pattern that is subject to vehicular traffic regulations. In urban areas, gaps between roads are often occupied by buildings and other obstacles to radio communication, so routing messages along roads is typically necessary.

Section snippets

Motivation

A fundamental aspect of the success of any VANET is the presence of a sufficient number of network nodes to allow forwarding of messages in the network. Road characteristics such as traffic signals and stop signs affect the flow of traffic in urban areas, breaking any sufficiently dense streams of similar-velocity vehicles. Traffic density, measured in the number of vehicles per unit distance, has a large influence on road capacity and vehicle velocity. Messages in a VANET are forwarded along

Basic idea of the protocol

Reliable Inter-VEhicular Routing (RIVER) [2] is a position-based VANET routing protocol with an optimized greedy strategy. This protocol prefers transmitting messages using routes it deems to be reliable through its traffic monitoring components. This traffic monitoring happens in real-time by actively sending probe messages along streets and by passively monitoring messages that are transmitted between adjacent intersections. Furthermore, RIVER takes traffic monitoring a step further by

Traffic monitoring

Traffic monitoring in our protocol consists of both active and passive components that operate in real-time. For active traffic monitoring, the primary mechanism is the probe message: a RIVER protocol packet that is periodically sent by each node in the network. Probes perform dual functions of traffic detection and traffic information distribution. In addition, each node performs passive traffic monitoring by gathering data from each packet that it receives. Probe and routing packets carry two

Edge reliability

A crucial component of our protocol is its ability to estimate the reliability of a particular street edge. RIVER uses this reliability data as the primary factor in determining a successful routing path from a sender node to a receiver node. Vehicular nodes move quickly and frequently, so it is infeasible for each node to track the movement of all other nodes across a particular area to determine usable routes. Instead, we hypothesize that it is more efficient to determine if a particular

Routing

At its most basic level, RIVER is not unlike other geographic routing algorithms; our protocol identifies a path that connects a number of geographic locations and attempts to forward the message along that path. When a node originates a new message, it must first identify the geographic location of the message destination. In reality, the node may have cached this information from a previous message exchange with the destination, or it may need to inquire about the location. The design of an

Performance evaluation

To evaluate RIVER, we simulated the protocol with the ns-2 simulator [7] at version 2.33 using the CMU wireless extension, the default 802.11 bandwidth (2 Mbps) and default transmission ranges. Settings included “WirelessPhy” interface, the two-ray ground propagation model, omnidirectional antenna, and wireless channel configurations. (Our simulation source code is available upon request.)

For these simulations, an urban “Manhattan” street grid was used with 5 streets running in the horizontal

Conclusions and future work

In this paper, we have proposed “Reliable Inter-Vehicular Routing” (RIVER), a routing protocol for VANETs based on estimated network reliability. RIVER takes advantage of real-time traffic monitoring using active and passive methods. The protocol is able to effectively distribute reliability data throughout the VANET using known edge lists and weighted routes.

In our simulation environment, we found that RIVER provides the highest throughput in most traffic densities when using its recovery

Acknowledgments

We thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments which helped us greatly in improving the content and presentation of the paper. Thanks also to Brad Karp and Francesco Giudici for making source code available for their respective routing protocols, GPSR and STAR.

James Bernsen has an M.S degree in computer science at the University of Kentucky. His academic interests include distributed computing and mobile networking. He has worked as a software engineer and system analyst in the field of product lifecycle management (PLM) and currently manages the PLM team at Lexmark International, Inc.

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James Bernsen has an M.S degree in computer science at the University of Kentucky. His academic interests include distributed computing and mobile networking. He has worked as a software engineer and system analyst in the field of product lifecycle management (PLM) and currently manages the PLM team at Lexmark International, Inc.

Dr. D. Manivannan is currently an associate professor of Computer Science at University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA. He received an M.Sc degree in mathematics from University of Madras, Madras, India. He received M.S and PhD degrees in computer and information science from The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, in 1993 and 1997 respectively. He published his research work in the following areas: fault-tolerance and synchronization in distributed systems, routing in wormhole networks, routing in ad hoc networks, channel allocation in cellular networks, wireless personal area networks and sensor networks. Dr. Manivannan has published more than 50 articles in refereed International Journals (most of which were published by IEEE, ACM, Elsevier, and Springer) and International Conferences.

He is on the Editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Communications Magazine, Information Sciences journal, Wireless Personal Communications journal, International Journal On Advances in Telecommunications, International Journal On Advances in Networks and Services and International Journal On Advances in Systems and Measurements. He served as a program chair for two International Conferences and served as program committee member for over 30 International Conferences. He also served as reviewer for more than 30 International Journals published by ACM, IEEE, Elsevier, Springer, Oxford University Press and others. He also served on several proposal review panels of US National Science Foundation and as external tenure reviewer for other universities.

He is a recipient of the Faculty CAREER Award from the US National Science Foundation. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a senior member of the ACM.

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