Conditional transmissions, a strategy for highly dynamic vehicular ad hoc networks

Many solutions have been developed for routing messages in ad hoc networks. However, few of them are efficient when the network is highly dynamic. Indeed, when the dynamicity is high, building a routing table, discovering and maintaining a route or localizing a node is a great challenge. This topic is currently attracting attention with vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET), a special case of highly dynamic networks. VANET may allow to enhance road safety, and to develop new driver or passengers oriented services. In this paper we present a novel approach for routing in highly dynamic networks, relying on conditions-based communication. Instead of transporting addresses (or positions), a message is sent with some conditions used for retransmission or reception. Thanks to the dynamic evaluation of the conditions, we show that this solution can efficiently support the high dynamic of vehicular networks. We also analyze the performances of OLSR, Fast OLSR, AODV, and GAMER on several traffic road scenarios.