BAHG: Back-bone-assisted hop greedy routing for VANET's city environments

Using advanced wireless local area network technologies, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have become viable and valuable for their wide variety of novel applications, such as road safety, multimedia content sharing, commerce on wheels, etc. Multihop information dissemination in VANETs is constrained by the high mobility of vehicles and the frequent disconnections. Currently, geographic routing protocols are widely adopted for VANETs as they do not require route construction and route maintenance phases. Again, with connectivity awareness, they perform well in terms of reliable delivery. To obtain destination position, some protocols use flooding, which can be detrimental in city environments. Further, in the case of sparse and void regions, frequent use of the recovery strategy elevates hop count. Some geographic routing protocols adopt the minimum weighted algorithm based on distance or connectivity to select intermediate intersections. However, the shortest path or the path with higher connectivity may include numerous intermediate intersections. As a result, these protocols yield routing paths with higher hop count. In this paper, we propose a hop greedy routing scheme that yields a routing path with the minimum number of intermediate intersection nodes while taking connectivity into consideration. Moreover, we introduce back-bone nodes that play a key role in providing connectivity status around an intersection. Apart from this, by tracking the movement of source as well as destination, the back-bone nodes enable a packet to be forwarded in the changed direction. Simulation results signify the benefits of the proposed routing strategy in terms of high packet delivery ratio and shorter end-to-end delay.