Destination-aware context-based routing protocol with hybrid soft computing cluster algorithm for VANET

Due to the rapid topology change, frequent link failure, high vehicle mobility and hard delay constraints, the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) became a hot research topic in this smart era. VANET has vast application areas including road congestion notification, parking, traffic management, smart transportation, road-side business advertisements. In all these applications, the messages should reach the target location within certain time limits. So, there must be efficient soft computing-enabled routing in VANET which meets these delay constraints. Two soft computing algorithms were proposed in this paper: First, a hybrid clustering algorithm is proposed which combines the geographic- and context-based clustering approaches. The hybrid clustering reduces the control overhead and traffic in the network. Second, the destination-aware routing protocol is proposed for inter-clustering routing which improves the overall packet delivery ratio and reduces the end-to-end delay. The performance of the proposed approach is compared with the well-known cluster-based approaches. The result shows that the proposed approach outperforms the existing approaches.