Redefining route maintenance for vanets through logical route update

Abstract

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANETs) is an emerging network environment that aims to improve the road safety and at the same time provide various services on fly. It is a special case of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) having distinguishing characteristics like relatively high speed and variable node density. The routing protocols for such versatile networks must establish optimized route(s) and maintains them in an efficient manner. The two types of routing protocols, which are proactive and reactive respectively, may be used in such scenario. However, we are working on reactive protocols because of lesser standing overheads and lesser traffic generation for maintenance. The mobile scenario effects the routing in terms of frequent breakage of paths. In such a scenario, route error and maintenance will be frequently triggered. The route breaks because of the increased distance between the nodes or because of the non availability of receiver. In this thesis, we propose a preemptive approach for route maintenance in which it triggers before the actual route breaks. Based on the distance of a node from its next hop node and the density of nodes around it, route maintenance would be triggered before the breakage of route(s). A large distance amongst two nodes corresponds to weak signal strength and vice versa. A relative increase in routing overheads would help in enhancing the performance of the network in terms of throughput and increased connectivity time. Hence, the research work focuses on discovering new routes before the breakage of the old routes. The likelihood of obtaining the same route would remain there.