A survey of trajectory based data forwarding schemes for vehicular ad-hoc networks

Many studies demonstrated that Mobile Ad hoc networks routing protocols are not suitable for Vehicular ad hoc networks; the main reason relies on high mobility that causes a rapid topology change that leads to partitioning and routing link failure issues. Adaptable existing schemes also demonstrated a poor network performance, especially when the network density increases. The alternative is to develop new efficient routing schemes for VANETs. Trajectory based routing where the packet is forwarded from the source to the destination based only on vehicle´s trajectory information constitutes one class of forwarding protocols that are proposed for VANETs. This paper surveys such class of protocols, with a particular interest on their main features that have made them efficient for VANETs, and their comparison with respect to some standards metrics. Future directions with respect to VANETs routing schemes are also discussed.