BRAVE: Beacon-less routing algorithm for vehicular environments

We study the problem of multihop routing in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). IEEE 802.11p and other vehicular network standards advocate vehicles to issue periodic broadcast messages at regular intervals called beacons. Beacons include among other information geographic coordinates of the vehicle, heading, speed, etc. Thus, most VANET routing solutions in the literature use those beacons to know available neighbors and take position-based routing decisions. However, we argue that using that information to take routing decisions can result in inefficiencies such as temporal loops in the forwarding path, backward progress due to stale information and use of low-quality links. We propose a new protocol called BRAVE in which neighbor selection is done opportunistically in collaboration with neighbors. Our simulation results show that BRAVE is able to outperform existing solutions in a realistic urban scenario for a variety of network densities.