Traffic aware optimized zone based hierarchal link state routing protocol for VANET

VANET plays an important role in dissemination of traffic and emergency information among vehicles moving on roads. This information is used by various vehicular applications like safety applications, route guiding applications etc. However, because of high mobility of vehicular nodes, maintenance of routing tables generates high network traffic. In this paper we have proposed an optimization of Zone based Hierarchical Link State (ZHLS) routing protocol for VANET. The two tier topology of ZHLS allows building of a relatively stable routing path, however because of its proactive nature ZHLS creates huge network overhead when nodes are increased. In order to overcome this issue of network overhead that every proactive protocol causes we have optimized routing parameters of ZHLS based on traffic awareness and network performance. The proposed traffic aware optimized framework allows each vehicle to update its time interval for dissemination of routing information based on its context. Our experiments have proved our claim that by optimizing routing parameters of ZHLS a better performance in term of packet delivery ratio with low network overhead can be achieved.