Routing Architecture for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

The actual proposed routing protocols for VANETs (Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks) present different features for communication among hosts/vehicles considering the strong topology change, but most of these features are needed for routing in these specific networks. These routing protocols support vehicle traffic on a large scale, intense mobility of vehicles, connections without link breakage, etc. But as they are different protocols the routers (nodes) have to switch to a routing protocol in a certain moment, which is a problem. This paper presents a routing architecture for VANETs to face it. The most important technical features for routing in VANETs were grouped in the Routing Architecture. To validate the proposed architecture several existing protocols were unified in the architecture producing a new routing protocol for VANETs. The produced protocol is the Generic Vehicular Dynamic Source Routing (GVDSR). Simulations of the GVDSR protocol have been made on the Malaga city showing the contributions and advantages for routing performance. The proposed architecture and protocol were simulated in the Network Simulator 2 featuring better performance than the compared protocols.