Exploiting multi-hop connectivity for dynamic routing in VANETs

Recent vehicular routing proposals dynamically select forwarding paths based on real-time traffic information, mostly the vehicular density, and route the packets to the final destination using the sender-based forwarding approach. However, estimating the vehicular density can require a significant communications overhead, and the adoption of sender-based forwarding can increase the presence of unreliable radio links in multi-hop transmissions. In this context, this paper presents a novel contention-based forwarding protocol that dynamically selects routing paths based on their multi-hop connectivity. The paper outlines the design of the proposal, and the optimization of some its design parameters. The obtained results show that the technique proposed in this paper achieves high packet delivery ratios, while reducing the overhead and efficiently managing the communications channel.