Load Balanced VANET Routing in City Environments

To conquer VANET applications requirements, many routing protocols have been proposed. Most of them have focused on geographical routing because of VANETs specifications. Many of which have tried to find connected paths through the network, by forwarding the vehicular traffic towards paths with higher connectivity probability. Once all the nodes in the network use this same routing strategy, it will eventually lead to great amount of data traffic on particular higher rated roads. Therefore, higher congestion and drop ratios will occur on those roads. This means unbalanced data traffic distribution throughout the network which is the main concern of our proposed VLBR (VANET Load Balanced Routing) protocol in this paper. VLBR aims at balancing the traffic between all potential connected paths by attaining congestion feedback from the network and switching to lower congested routes by utilizing the k-Shortest Paths algorithm. The simulation results imply improved delivery ratio and throughput compared to other VANET protocols. Contrary to other routing mechanisms, VLBR maintains its high delivery ratio even in great traffic loads without imposing extra overhead to the network.