Macro-Level and Micro-Level Routing (MMR) for Urban Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Finding a reliable and efficient routing path in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is a challenging issue due to high mobility of vehicles and frequent link breakage. Motivated by this, we propose a robust and efficient routing protocol, called MMR. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: two-level routing and a new routing metric. A routing process of MMR consists of the macro level and the micro level. MMR forwards a packet to an approximate location of the destination at the macro level and then forwards a packet to the exact location of the destination at the micro level. This two-level routing reduces the protocol overhead and improves scalability in terms of the number of nodes. MMR also introduces a new routing metric that reduces the protocol overhead and path breakage by considering velocities of vehicles. Through simulations, we show that MMR improves the routing performance by about 30~40% in highly mobile environments, compared to the existing ad hoc routing protocols such as AODV and GPSR.