A New Channel Assignment Scheme for Interference-Aware Routing in Vehicular Networks

Mobile computing and vehicular communications are becoming a very important paradigm for wireless communications, mainly because of their ability to adapt to different mobile applications. In this paper, we propose a new scheme for reducing the interference level during mobile transmissions in the VehiculAr inter-NETworking (VANET) environment, taking the advantage of the multi-channel nature of IEEE802.11p standard. In order to relieve the effects of the co-channel interference perceived by mobile nodes, transmission channels are switched on a basis of a periodical Signal-to-Interference Ratio (SIR) evaluation. The attention is focused on the routing level of VANET and we propose an interference aware routing scheme for multi-radio vehicular networks, wherein each node is equipped with a multi-channel radio interface. A new metric is also proposed, based on the maximization of the average SIR level of the connection between source and destination. Our solution has been integrated with the AODV routing protocol to design an enhanced Signal-to-Interference-Ratio-AODV (SIR-AODV). NS-2 has been used for implementing and testing the proposed idea, and significant performance enhancements were obtained, in terms of throughput, packet delivery and, obviously, interference.