A routing protocol for VANETs with adaptive frame aggregation and packet size awareness

Existing multi-hop routing protocols for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) do not consider the packet payload size and some important MAC layer issues for the route selection. In this paper, we first solve the performance anomaly problem by providing the same transmission time for different nodes which have different channel qualities using an adaptive frame aggregation mechanism. Next, we propose a packet size-aware routing protocol where a communication route is determined by taking into account the payload size of data packets. We consider multiple metrics for the route selection specifically vehicle mobility, frame aggregation efficiency, and link quality. The proposed protocol is evaluated using real-world experiments as well as computer simulations.