Introducing lane based sectoring for routing in VANETs

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) provide vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication using Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC). The core objective of VANETs is to provide safety message communication among vehicles. In dense urban traffic, safety message communication encounters severe packet collisions due to excessive number of nodes contending to access the control channel. In such a complex dense and mobile scenario, an ideal single vehicle per time slot has yet not been achieved. This paper introduces the use of lane level location information to achieve a single vehicle per time slot configuration. The transmission range of a message originator is divided into a grid using distance and lanes as the two variables. Each block within the grid houses a single vehicle at most that is assigned a unique time slot. The contention among nodes for the same time slot is virtually removed. Theory and ns-3 simulation justify the feasibility, and prove that the technique reduces packet collisions by 2%, and improves message dissemination speed by as much as 30% each hop.