Scalable Hybrid Location-Based Routing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are highly mobile wireless networks that are designed to support vehicular safety, traffic monitoring, and other applications. Within VANETs, vehicle mobility will cause the communication links between vehicles to be broken frequently. Such link failures require a direct response from the routing protocols, leading to an excessive increase in the routing control overhead and a degradation in network scalability. In this work we investigate how such high link failure rates impact the scalability and performance of a recently proposed hybrid location-based routing protocol, HLAR. A novel feature of HLAR is its ability to possess effective routing strategies which are a spatial function of the location information quality. We show that even in the presence of high link failure rates, HLAR shows high scalability performance, making it an ideal candidate for future routing within emerging intelligent transportation systems. The optimality of HLAR and the impact of location error on its scalability is also discussed.