REFF: REliable and Fast Forwarding in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) has emerged as an increasingly dominant technology for future connected vehicle and vehicular networks, where the focus of the development of VANET lies in the standardization of message transmission and dissemination via multi-hop broadcasting. However, the current communication protocols concerning VANET face many challenges, including data flooding and collision, transmission delay and other problems. Most of the challenges are closely related to next-hop selection. Therefore, this paper proposes a new routing protocol named REliable and Fast Forwarding (REFF) to optimize the selection of nodes in VANET. In this protocol, node filtering and node evaluation are two main steps. Distance between previous node and candidate node, relative velocity between previous node and candidate nodes, included angle between direction of target node’s velocity and candidate node’s velocity and transmission power of candidate node are adopted as indexes to help select a specific node as the next hop using Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). By using this technique, the number of candidates as next-hop is largely reduced, avoiding the data flooding and resulting transmission relay. In addition, simulations based on experiments are done to verify the feasibility. The results show that message achieves a faster and more reliable transmission using REFF.