A Geographical Routing Protocol Based on Link Connectivity Analysis for Urban VANETs

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are important parts of Intelligent Transport System (ITS). As a special kind of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), VANETs support dynamic inter-vehicle communications. However, the high mobility of vehicular nodes results in a highly dynamic network topology and the network fragmentations, which brings a great challenge to routing in VANETs. In this paper, we propose a new routing scheme called LCGL for urban VANETs, which is formed by Link Connectivity analysis based on Geographical Location, to overcome the common failures of VANETs routing in urban areas. Combined with a digital city map, LCGL manages the geographic location information of nodes and the connectivity of links. LCGL selects the shortest connected path to forward the packets by calculating the path length and the connectivity of links. Simulation results have shown that LCGL offers stable end-to-end communications, and outperforms existing typical VANETs routing protocols in urban environment, especially in terms of packet delivery rate and average hops. In addition, LCGL achieves a lower delay and jitter, as well as a higher throughput.