A bio-inspired geographic routing in VANETs

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are going to be an important communication infrastructure in our moving life. The design of routing protocols in VANETs is a significant and necessary issue for supporting VANET-based applications. However, due to high mobility, frequent link disconnection, and uneven distribution of vehicles, it becomes quite challenging to establish a robust route for delivering packets. This paper presents a novel routing protocol called artificial spider-web based geographic routing protocol (ASGR) to address these problems by selecting the optimal route according to the information of the paths (e.g. connectivity, delay and number of hops) through the use of artificial spiders. By constructing the spider-web and path tree, ASGR can find a robust route to the destination taking the route connectivity, path delay and total number of hops into consideration. Simulation results show that our ASGR outperforms GyTAR and STAR in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR) and end-to-end delay (E2ED) with the number of nodes and packets generation interval varying.