Towards enhanced reactive routing in urban Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

In this paper, we investigate the efficiency of the reactive routing approach in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) with main focus on reducing the incurred overhead by control packets used for routes establishment. In AODV, for example, the excessive number of RREQs broadcasted in the network, to respond to the rapid change in network topology, usually hinders the fast transmission of some important packets carrying critical information. Moreover, it may also lead to severe congestion situations causing the loss of some packets, and thus reducing the QoS of the corresponding applications. To face this problem, we propose a simple yet efficient solution in which each vehicle appends the geographical location of the destination to each generated RREQ packet. Thereby, this latter packet will be rebroadcasted only by the receiver vehicles located at this region or heading towards it, which significantly reduces the network overhead. The obtained simulation results have proven the efficiency of our solution under various scenarios.