Timer-based greedy forwarding algorithm in vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks bring new applications and services for wireless networks, such as information sharing among vehicles. These applications need data dissemination strategies or routing protocols to transmit data among vehicles efficiently. In order to reduce the transmission delay between the source vehicle and the destination vehicle, an efficient forwarding algorithm called timer-based greedy forwarding (TGF) is proposed in this study. TGF can find forwarding paths with fewer hop counts, lower transmission delay and fewer control packets. The proposed TGF chooses the farthest vehicle from a sender to be a packet forwarder, which is decided by receivers themselves. Although the concept of the TGF is similar to the greedy forwarding algorithm, the message exchanging for neighbouring information maintenance in the proposed TGF is unnecessary. To achieve this goal, three challenges that need to be tackled in the TGF are (i) the farthest node selection, (ii) timer error at an intersection and (iii) processing of redundant forwarded packets. Comparing with other methods, the simulation results show that the proposed TGF reduces the number of control packets, transmission delay and hop counts between a source vehicle and a destination vehicle significantly.