Efficient angular routing protocol for inter-vehicular communication in vehicular ad hoc networks

Inter-vehicular communication involves the exchange of data between two mobile devices in an ad hoc network. Since the devices are not stationary and the topology is wide, the passage of messages between source and destination nodes involves various intermediate nodes that act as links between the two. The more the number of nodes involved in a network at a time, the more is the power consumed by them, thereby adding to the average power consumption of the network and the transmission time. The authors aim to develop an efficient routing protocol, which finds the minimum possible path length between a source and a destination involving minimum nodes to transmit data. Information regarding the angular position of the nodes is exploited in selecting the most suitable node for transmission, thereby achieving proper network connectivity among nodes with minimum power consumption. The proposed protocol has been compared with dynamic source routing (DSR) and DSR with stale route removed (DSR-SRR). The results achieved by implementing the proposed protocol establish the fact that our protocol is better than DSR and DSR-SRR in terms of the following: (i) average power consumption during transmission, (ii) throughput of transmission and (iii) number of control packets used. The proposed protocol proves to work relatively efficiently even under dense traffic conditions.