A-STAR: A Mobile Ad Hoc Routing Strategy for Metropolis Vehicular Communications

One of the major issues that affect the performance of Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANET) is routing. Recently, position-based routing for MANET is found to be a very promising routing strategy for inter-vehicular communication systems (IVCS). However, position-based routing for IVCS in a built-up city environment faces greater challenges because of potentially more uneven distribution of vehicular nodes, constrained mobility, and difficult signal reception due to radio obstacles such as high-rise buildings. This paper proposes a new position-based routing scheme called Anchor-based Street and Traffic Aware Routing (A-STAR), designed specifically for IVCS in a city environment. Unique to A-STAR is the usage of information on city bus routes to identify an anchor path with high connectivity for packet delivery. Along with a new recovery strategy for packets routed to a local maximum, the proposed protocol shows significant performance improvement in a comparative simulation study with other similar routing approaches.