Design and evaluation of GBSR-B, an improvement of GPSR for VANETs

Wireless vehicular communications are a key technology to provide drivers with novel services such as collision avoidance, safety warnings and real-time traffic information. Other services are high-speed toll collection, infotainment and wireless ubiquitous connectivity. It is clear that vehicular communications will be a cornerstone of the future transport systems which will significantly change our daily lives. Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have rapidly emerged and raised novel research challenges such as the design of network protocols adapted to the specific features of VANETs, e.g. the high speed of vehicles. Also, the design of realistic simulation frameworks is an important goal to speed up the development of VANETs. This paper presents the design and evaluation of GBSR-B, a routing protocol based on GPSR that seeks to improve the performance of VANETs over urban scenarios. Our proposal includes a novel algorithm to select the optimal next-hop forwarding node. This paper also presents an alternative to the perimeter mode used in GPSR. We compare our proposal GBSR-B to GPSR and AODV using the network simulator NCTUns 6.0, showing better results in terms of packet losses.