Performance analysis of XOR-based routing in urban vehicular ad hoc networks

This paper presents the URBAN_XOR¹ protocol, an XOR-based flat routing mechanism developed for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) formed in urban scenarios. The paper firstly describes the URBAN_XOR routing principle, which requires reduced knowledge about the set of nodes present in the VANET in order to provide traffic forwarding. Basically, the URBAN XOR protocol introduces the concept of local visibility, prioritizing the insertion of closer neighbors (in number of hops) in the routing tables, and simplifying the management of the frequent network mobility found in VANETs. Then, the performance of the proposed URBAN_XOR protocol is compared through simulation with other topology-based and position-based protocols, characterizing its performance in terms of path availability ratio, end-to-end delay, path length and path duration. The results reveal that URBAN_XOR contributes for the overall network stability, reducing the end-to-end delay due to its ability of generating shorter paths. At the same time, URBAN_XOR exhibits path availability similar to other topology-based protocols, but exhibiting better path duration times.