VCARP: Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks context-aware routing protocol

Vehicular Networks routing protocols must deal with several issues such as high mobility, high speed and, consequently, high disconnection rate among the network nodes. In this paper, we propose VCARP, a geocast routing protocol for Vehicular Networks that takes into account context informations of the network (such as nodes location and destination) to make routing decisions. It consists of a shared cache mechanism used to avoid packets loss due to full caches, and a flow-based routing to reduce network overhead caused by unnecessary packet retransmissions. Simulations show that the proposed protocol can increase packet delivery rate by 40% and decrease overhead by up to 89%, compared to another geocast protocol of the literature. In addition, we have studied the influence of cache size and neighbors discovery period duration on the packet delivery rate.