THERA: Two-level Hierarchical Hybrid Road-Aware Routing for Vehicular Networks

There are various research challenges in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) that need to be focused until an extensive deployment of it becomes conceivable. Design and development of a scalable routing algorithm for VANETs is one of the critical issue due to frequent path disruptions caused by the vehicle's mobility. This study aims to provide a novel road-aware routing protocol for vehicular networks named as Two-level hierarchical Hybrid Road-Aware (THERA) routing for vehicular ad hoc networks. The proposed protocol is designed explicitly for inter-vehicle communication. In THERA, roads are distributed into non-overlapping road segments to reduce the routing overhead. Unlike other protocols, discovery process does not flood the network with packet broadcasts. Instead, THERA uses the concept of Gateway Vehicles (GV) for the discovery process. In addition, a route between source and destination is flexible to changing topology, as THERA only requires road segment ID and destination ID for the communication. Furthermore, Road-Aware routing reduces the traffic congestion, bypasses the single point of failure, and facilitates the network management. Finally yet importantly, this paper also proposes a probabilistical model to estimate a path duration for each road segment using the highway mobility model. The flexibility of the proposed protocol is evaluated by performing extensive simulations in NS3. We have used SUMO simulator to generate real time vehicular traffic on the roads of Gangnam, South Korea. Comparative analysis of the results confirm that routing overhead for maintaining the network topology is smaller than few previously proposed routing algorithms.