Optimizing Power Utilization in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks through Angular Routing: A Protocol and Its Performance Evaluation

It is possible for vehicles moving on a highway to communicate with each other, if they are equipped with wireless interfaces. These vehicles, equipped with wireless connectivity, are referred to as nodes in a Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET). The more the number of nodes involved in a network at a time, the more is the power consumed by them, thereby adding to the average power consumption of the network and the transmission time. In this paper, we propose an efficient routing protocol, named as Efficient Angular Routing (EAR), which finds the minimum possible path length between a source and a destination involving minimum nodes to transmit data. Information regarding the angular position of the nodes is exploited in selecting the most suitable node for transmission, thereby, achieving proper network connectivity among nodes with minimum power consumption. The proposed protocol has been compared with Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) [2, 3] and DSR-with stale route removed (DSR-SRR) [4]. The results achieved establish the fact that the proposed protocol, EAR, outperforms DSR and DSR-SRR in terms of the average power consumption during transmission and the number of control packets used. The proposed protocol proves to work relatively better even under dense traffic conditions.