A swarm intelligence-based routing protocol for vehicular networks

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are a particular case of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). They are applied to exchange information among vehicles and between vehicles and a nearby fixed infrastructure. Unlike the MANETs, the VANETs have highly mobile nodes that cause a dynamic topology, a disconnected network, etc. Consequently, these features pose numerous challenges. One of them is routing. In a vehicular environment, the routing protocol needs to cope with events like link failure and to find an effective path to propagate the information toward the desired destination. In this context, we assume in this paper that the vehicles are intelligent and have a knowledge base about their communication environment. Our aim is to carry out the routing of the data based on swarm intelligence. The optimum route is explored using the Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO). The proposed approach is called the Optimised Agent-based AODV Protocol for VANET (OptA²PV).