Routing Protocols in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks: A Performance Evaluation

The presented article evaluates the routing protocols in connected Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANET) through 802.11p considering synthetic mobility models and vehicular traffic generators, Manhattan and Intelligent Driver Mobility (IDM) models were selected respectively. The following programs were installed on a Linux-based system to simulate the scenarios: SUMO for the traffic management, NS-2 for simulating the data network and MOVE for exporting the information from SUMO to NS-2. Proactive and reactive routing protocols classification was considered, to subsequently apply the DSDV and AOMDV protocols that proved to have better performance. In the simulated scenarios, a low, medium and high number of connections were used with two communication types: Vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) for VANET networks. The indicators that were analyzed to determine the performance of the protocols were Throughput, Packet delivery ratio relationship (PDR), Average End to End Delay and Normalized routing load (NRL). The study was found that for V2V communications, regardless of the connections or the mobility model, AOMDV or DSDV can be used since the difference in performance is minimal. The results indicate that the best protocol is AOMDV with a superiority to DSDV in most cases. It is concluded that the model closest to reality is IDM since it is based on a traffic generator while the Manhattan model, based on mathematical formulas offers ambiguous results.