Towards the Use of XOR-Based Routing Protocols in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper we present a performance analysis of XOR¹ -based flat routing protocols in high mobility conditions, considering a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) formed in a highway scenario. First, we describe an XOR-based protocol that incorporates several adaptations of the existing XOR-based routing algorithms for wired networks, in order to cope with the network mobility. Then we propose an improved version of it, XORi, which modifies the protocol´s information gathering process to accommodate the specific dynamic nature of VANETs topology. Finally, we evaluate the performance of XOR-based protocols with other topology-based routing protocols. Simulation results allow us to characterize the performance of this class of protocols through the comparison of the packet delivery ratio, end-to-end path delay and average number of path hops². When a moderate density of nodes is considered, simulations show that XOR-based algorithms achieve almost the same packet delivery rate as link state algorithms, such as OLSR, while for high density of nodes XOR-based algorithms scale better in terms of delay when compared to source routing algorithms, such as DSR³.