GLCV: A Routing Scheme Based on Geographic Link Connectivity Management for Urban Vehicular Environments

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is an important part of Intelligent Transport System (ITS). As a special kind of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), VANETs supports dynamic inter-vehicle communications. However, the high mobility of vehicular nodes results in a highly dynamic network topology and the network fragmentations. All these bring a great challenge to routing in VANETs. In this paper, we propose a new VANETs routing scheme called GLCV (Geographic-based Link Connectivity for Vehicular Networks), based on Geographic Link Connectivity management, to overcome the frequent failures of links. Combined with a digital city map, GLCV manages the geographic location information of nodes and the connectivity of links. GLCV selects the shortest connected path to forward the packet by calculating the length and the connectivity of links. Simulation results have shown that GLCV offers stable end-to-end communications, and outperforms existing typical VANETs routing scheme in urban environment, especially in terms of packet delivery rate and average hops. Thus GLCV achieves a lower delay and jitter and a higher throughput.