Applicability of position-based routing for VANET in highways and urban environment

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Abstract

In the last years many routing protocols proposals have been made considering the particular VANET characteristics. From the many proposals that came up, the protocols based on the vehicles positions were found to be the most adequate to VANETs due to their resilience to handling the nodes position variation. In this study we will survey the existing position-based routing protocols. Unlike other studies we will emphasise on their applicability to different environments. We start by characterising the vehicular network environment, namely the urban and the highway environments. Afterwards, topology-based protocols are compared to position-based protocols and to the latter are identified the different used strategies and their performances are qualitatively evaluated relatively to different metrics. The different position-based routing proposals are described including a pseudo-code specification, and a comparison is made based on different perspectives. To conclude, the main constrains to urban and highway environments are characterised and the adaptability of each protocol to each of the environments is evaluated.

Introduction

Recent advances in wireless technologies and embedded systems extended the use of communications to new domains. Taking advantages of such technological advances, vehicle and equipment manufacturers have recognised the opportunity of enhancing the surface transportation by using the communication capabilities of the Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) to offer an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) to the drivers. The major goal of this system is to improve the drivers safety by informing them about dangers and situations that they cannot see. It will also be used to support other services such as broadcast of weather or traffic conditions or infotainment to make a trip more pleasant to the passengers (Research and Innovative Technology Administration (RITA), 2009, ETSI, 2009). In Toor et al. (2008) the most relevant applications have been surveyed and the major technical challenges identified showing that major modifications are needed in all the layers of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference model. To support such variety of services, ITS will provide communication amongst vehicles, between vehicles and the roadway infrastructure and from latter to vehicles and wireless devices that are carried by drivers, pedestrians and cyclists.

Due to the well-defined mobility pattern of the nodes and characteristics of the surrounding environment, most of the solutions that have been proposed for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) are not suitable for VANET (Füßler et al., 2003, Selvaretnam and Wong, 2004). In Hartenstein and Laberteaux (2008) it is shown that the different type of applications, the resources and the environment make VANET a unique area of wireless communication.

Thus, a significant effort is being put to design solutions for this new type of environment by the industry, standardisation bodies and the research community, as surveyed in Papadimitratos and La Fortelle (2009). Since 2000, a significant number of research projects developed by car manufacturers in consortium with other entities have been funded either by national agencies or international entities. These projects aim at promoting energy efficiency and road safety. The first ones were focused on the design of autonomous systems aimed to improve the transport infrastructure or the vehicles themselves. A few examples can be represented by the Network on Wheels (NoW) (Festag et al., 2008), Fleetnet (Hartenstein et al., 2001) and CarTALK 2000 (Reichardt et al., 2002). More recently, projects were focused in cooperative systems based on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, rather than in autonomous systems (Toulminet et al., 2008): CVIS (Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems) aimed to define a unified architecture and a wide range of cooperative services and applications; SAFESPOT aimed to create dynamic cooperative networks that increased road safety through the drivers' perception of the neighbourhood; and COOPERS (Co-operative Systems for Intelligent Road Safety) aimed to enhance the road safety through the development of cooperative traffic management applications. eCoMove is an ongoing project that aims to use vehicle cooperation for a more eco-friendly driving. Also, important automobile manufacturers have joined their efforts and created a non-profit organisation, the Car2Car Communication Consortium (C2CCC), which aims at increasing road safety and traffic efficiency through the use of VANET communications.

A major result of these efforts, promoted by the COMeSafety initiative, is the coordination and consolidation of the scientific results that lead to the definition of a common reference architecture with a direct commitment of standardisation bodies, such as European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) TC ITS and the International Organization for Standards (ISO) TC204 WG16 (ITS Communications). This architecture, the Communication Access for Land Mobile (CALM), described in Initiative (2006) and briefly surveyed by Kosch et al. (2009) was been adopted in Europe since then. CALM defines a set of wireless communication protocols and air interfaces for a variety of communication scenarios of ITS, decoupling applications from the communication infrastructure.

Another important contribution was made by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) with the standardisation of the Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE), a complete protocol stack and architecture specifically designed for VANET, which is described in the set of standards IEEE 1609 (IEEE trial-use standard for wireless access in vehicular environments (wave) – resource manager, 2006a, IEEE trial-use standard for wireless access in vehicular environments – security services for applications and management messages, 2006b, IEEE trial-use standard for wireless access in vehicular environments (wave) – networking services, 2007, IEEE trial-use standard for wireless access in vehicular environments (wave) – multi-channel operation, 2006c). In the context of this standardisation work a new IEEE standard was defined for PHY and MAC layers, 802.11p (Jiang et al., 2008). In spite of the advantages of using 802.11p, several studies suggested that it has several performance problems (Bilstrup et al.,, Eichler, 2007). When using the different access classes provided by 802.11p messages can be prioritized. However, the Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) does not guarantee channel access before a fixed deadline and so one can not ensure time critical message dissemination. Therefore, unacceptable channel access delay can be experienced, specially in dense regions or heavy traffic conditions.

For more than one decade research community is been also actively contributing to this area, proposing new applications (Isento et al., 2011), protocols and algorithms to solve problems related to medium access control (Inoue and Nakagawa, 1994, Stanica et al., 2010), routing (Chennikara-Varghese et al., 2006, Daeinabi et al., 2011) and even security (Qian and Moayeri, 2008), which have been studied and surveyed in different works (Willke et al., 2009, Luo and Hubaux, 2004, Wang et al., 2008, Menouar et al., 2006).

Although numerous proposals appeared in the different areas, we focused our attention in routing protocols due to the challenging connectivity and mobility problems they have in urban and highway environments. Different proposals have been made considering either urban scenario or highway, such as the one described by Mo et al. (2006) and Karp and Kung (2000), respectively. There are also others that have been made considering both and behave differently depending on the scenario (Okada et al., 2008). In this paper we survey unicast position-based routing protocols regarding their applicability to both scenarios. Unlike other studies that survey the position-based routing protocols with no regard to the scenario (Li and Wang, 2007) or the position-based protocols targeted to the urban scenario (Guoqing et al., 2008), we focused our attention on both urban and highway and we compare both cases.

The remaining of this paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 we differentiate amongst MANET and VANET and we characterise the VANET scenarios. In Section 3 we survey and characterise the different routing protocols and their strategies. Section 4 details position-based protocols. Section 5 compares the routing protocols on each of the scenarios and in Section 6 the we concluded that there is not a protocol suitable for both environments.

Section snippets

Scenario

There are significant differences between communications in MANET and VANET. In VANET one can differentiate amongst urban and highway scenario. In this section a characterisation of each of this scenarios will be made.

Routing protocols for VANETs

There are different classification frameworks that have been used to describe routing protocols for VANET. Some authors use as baseline of classification the time at which the route lookup is made (proactive or reactive routing), whilst others differentiate in terms of the information used in forwarding (topology-based or position-based routing). In our paper we use the second approach.

In this section the differences amongst topology based and position-based routing protocols are described and

Position-based routing protocols

The different combinations of the above mentioned strategies lead to the existence of several position-based routing protocols. This solution is the base of the current position-based protocols that are being used in VANETs. In all of them, the sending node first uses a location service in order to find the geographic position of the destination node. This location service can be either reactive or proactive. The next sections will describe the most relevant routing protocols.

Evaluation

As stated in Section 2.3, vehicles mobility have many differences in highway and urban scenarios and these differences have a significant impact in the routing protocol performance. In this section we identify, for each scenario, how each of their properties demand for the routing protocol properties and evaluate the adaptability of the routing protocol to the scenarios.

Conclusion

In this work a qualitative survey of position-based routing protocols was made with consideration to the different environments. The major goal was to identify weather there is a good candidate for both environments or not.

A differentiation of the environment characteristics was made and we found that urban and highway environments have different characteristics regarding the scenario, the mobility pattern and the mobility properties.

The survey of the position-based routing approaches started

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by FCT (INESC-ID multiannual funding) through the PIDDAC Program funds.

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