MAZACORNET: Mobility aware zone based ant colony optimization routing for VANET

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET) exhibit highly dynamic behavior with high mobility and random network topologies. The performance of Transmission Control Protocols (TCP) in such wireless ad hoc networks is plagued by a number of problems: frequent link failures, scalability, multi-hop data transmission and data loss. In this work, we make use of the vehicle´s movement pattern, vehicle density, vehicle velocity and vehicle fading conditions to develop a hybrid, multi-path ant colony based routing algorithm, Mobility Aware Zone based Ant Colony Optimization Routing for VANET (MAZACORNET). that exhibits locality and scalability. We use ACO to find multiple routes between nodes in the network to aid in link failures. To achieve scalability we partition the network into multiple zones. We use proactive approach to find a route within a zone and reactive approach to find routes between zones using the local information stored in each zone thereby trying to reduce broadcasting and congestion. Our proposed algorithm makes effective use of the network bandwidth, is scalable and is robust to link failures. The results show that the algorithm works well for dense networks. The algorithm produces better delivery ratio and is scalable for zones beyond four. When compared to other existing VANET algorithms, the hybrid algorithm proved to be more efficient in terms of packet delivery ratio and end to end delay. To our knowledge this is the first ant based routing algorithm for VANET that uses the concept of zones.