A Novel Approach to Efficient and Reliable Routing
in Vanets
G.Mary Valantina


Sathyabama University,
Chennai,
Tamilnadu,India.
Valantina78@gmail.com.
Abstract— Vehicular Ad hoc Network (Vanet) is one of the
emerging technology to support safety, traffic monitoring and
comfort related services. Vanet is a subclass of Manet but its
topology changes rapidly and network gets disconnected
frequently. The prevailing routing protocol of Manet is very
much applicable to Vanet. Because of its frequently
disconnecting routes it is difficult to design an efficient routing
protocol. Proper design of routing protocol for Vanet makes the
network a successful one. In this paper we bring a concept of
introducing Mesh routers in the network thereby optimal route
is selected which leads to a decrease in routing overhead, packet
end-to-end delay and an increase in packet delivery ratio.
Keywords—Vanets, Manets, Mesh Routers, Routing
Overhead, End to End delay.
I. INTRODUCTION
Recently Vanet is becoming an important area of research
because of its promising solution to Intelligent Transportation
System (ITS).Vanet is basically developed for safety and
comfort application for passenger. With the continuous
increasing number of vehicles on roads, the safety
applications of VANET are extremely important to thousands
of people’s lives. Vanets are characterised by highly mobile
nodes and are constrained by some patterns of movement.
Vanets are subclass of Manets, in vanets the Vehicles are
equipped with an On Board Communication unit (OBU) and
thereby the vehicles are acting as a node in the network. This
OBU is connected to Road Side Unit (RSU)[1] via radios, The
RSU’s plays an important role in the vanets environment for
message transfer. IEEE 802.11 supports Wireless Access in
Vehicular Environments. But for short range communication
Vanets uses Dedicated Short Range
Communication(DSRC)standard.[2]DSRC has a
communication range of 300m to 1Km.The VANET which
supports complete mobility and applications in dynamic,
random, and multi-hop topology is one of the branches of
MANET (Mobile Ad Hoc Network) in a special situation. In
VANET, the change of the topology is rapid[3] but
predictable; fragmentation of the network occurs frequently;
the mobility of the nodes is regular and they do not have the
problem of energy limitation, there is rich information from
outside equipments such as GPS (Global Positioning System)
and GIS (Geographic Information System)[4]-[6]. To cope up
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S.Jayashri
Adhiparasakthi Engineering College,
Melmaruvathur, Kanchipuram District,
Tamilnadu,India.
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with this rapid changing topology in Vanet it is a high time
need to go for an alternate approach for packet forwarding
technique.
II. UNIQUE FEATURES OF VANET
Vanet is a subclass of Manet, so whatever works for Manet
will also work for Vanets.But Vanet has some unique
characteristics like its topology changes rapidly as the
mobility of node is very fast[6],[7]. The nodes mobility is
constrained within the road topology and the movement of the
node is unpredictable. The network structure is unbounded
such that a vehicle wants to send a data to a vehicle which
may be inside the same area or in different area cities,
different cities even over countries. So the data has to be send
in a timely manner and with security.
III. TYPES OF COMMUNICATION
There are two types of communication possible in Vanets
vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to Infrastructure
(V2I).V2V communication is about communication between
the vehicles whereas V2I communication is about the
communication between the vehicle and some road side units
as shown in Fig 1.Road side units are some fixed
infrastructure that is installed along the road side such as
gateways or base stations which provide internet facility in
vanets.
Fig.1.Communication in vanets.
Since the topology of the network is constantly changing, the
routing of packets between any pair of nodes becomes a
challenging task. Multicast routing in vehicular Ad hoc
network is another challenge because the multicast tree is no
longer static because the nodes moves in a random fashion
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In this paper, we present a variant of the AODV protocol that
effectively mitigates the problems and limitations associated
with the Physical, MAC and Network layers. One of our key
contributions is the introduction of a new routing metric that
allows differentiating between node types. The effect of this
new metric is that routes preferentially include Mesh Routers
in the network. With the help of extensive simulations; we
show that our variant of AODV outperforms standard AODV
by a considerable margin.
IV. AODV ROUTING PROTOCOL FOR VANETS
AODV is an on demand routing protocol and it is based on
distance vector technology. When the source host wants to
send packets to the destination, it checks its routing table and
if it cannot get the route from its routing table, it will
broadcast a Route Request (RREQ)[8]. The neighbours may
establish the routes back to the source host through the RREQ.
If the neighbour has an active route to the destination, it will
send a Route Reply (RREP) to the source. Otherwise, the
RREQ will be re-broadcast further until a route is found. If a
reply is sent, all hosts along that path may establish the route
to the destination.
A variable called destination sequence number is used to
avoid routing loop and to identify the freshness of the route.
The sequence of a mobile host is increased at every time that
it sends RREQ or RREP. The link with the largest destination
sequence number is mostly preferred. If several paths have the
same sequence, the shortest one will be chosen. More details
about AODV [10],[14] can be found in AODV’s desirable
features are its low byte overhead and loop free routing. But
the on-demand route query usually brings a longer delay for
the first few packets. The genuineness of the destination
sequence and distance vector leaves vulnerabilities to
attackers. The network will be compromised due to the
deficiencies introduced by the attacks.
ACK is received. Broadcast packets are sent and they are
readily available which does not expect any acknowledgement
from the recipient.
Route discovery process is initiated either when the
sender S detects that a previously determined route to
destination node D is broken, or if source node S does not
know a route to the destination. In our implementation, we
assume that node S can know that the route is broken only if it
attempts to use the route. When a source node S transmits a
data packet along a particular route, if the next hop on the
route is broken a node along that path returns a route error
message. When source node S receives the route error
message, a route discovery is initiated for destination D. using
the algorithm mentioned above, the route request would reach
every node that is reachable from node S. Using location
information, we attempt to reduce the number of nodes to
whom route request is propagated.
Dynamic source routing (DSR) and ad hoc on-
demand distance vector routing (AODV) protocols [13]-[[16]
proposed previously are both based on variations of flooding.
DSR and AODV also use some optimizations - several of
these optimizations as well as other optimizations suggested
can be used in conjunction with the proposed algorithm
In this paper our protocol variant (EV-AODV), adds simple
modifications to AODV. In standard AODV hop count is
selected but in EV-AODV the Mesh Router Count is selected
as the routing metric.. By selecting routes which minimize this
metric, we can guarantee that that the established routes
primarily consist of Mesh Routers [3] as shown in Fig 2.

The link layer of our simulator implements the

complete IEEE 802.11 standard Medium Access Control
(MAC) protocol Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) in
order to accurately model the contention of nodes for the
wireless medium [11],[12]. DCF is designed to use both
virtual carrier sensing and channel sensing mechanisms to
reduce the probability of collisions due to hidden terminals.

To avoid the hidden terminal problem the transmission

of each unicast packet is preceded by a Request-to-
Fig 2.Mesh routers in Vanets.
Send/Clear-to-Send (RTS/CTS) exchange [9] that reserves the
wireless channel for transmission of a data packet. When a
The mesh router does not require any predetermined path
node wants to send a data to another node before sending the
between them. Mesh routers are included in the network and
data, a RTS signal will be send to the destination node. If the
they act in real time to find a active route. The mesh routers
destination is free it will send a CTS signal to the source node.
actively note down the activity of the network and monitor the
While this is happening another node which wants to send a
nearby devices. Even mobile mesh routers has come into
data to the same destination then it also sends a RTs to that
existence which can work at the speed of vehicle.
destination node but it will send a wait signal because it is
Upon deployment of the mesh routers, they monitor each
busy. So by this way collision of data packets are avoided. For
other and automatically detect an optimal route which is free
each correctly received packet an Acknowledgment (ACK) is
of contention. It provides graceful re-routing of packets when
send to the sender. The sender retransmits the packet until this

15
 there is a network failure. The flowchart for the working of The path chosen on the basis of throughput, packet delivery,
EV-AODV is shown below. signal-to-noise ratios, and other key criteria is considered to
be optimal. In this manner a final route is selected which
provides optimized channel diversity and guarantees
START
¾ Increase of data delivery ratio
¾ Decrease of data packet delay
¾ Decrease of routing overhead
Node Receives RREQ

Y Is it a
Mesh
router
Increment the Mesh Router
count N
Forward the REQ
Is it a
Destination
Y engaging minimally loaded channels for routing data traffic.
Select the Path with Max Mesh Router Count
Send the RREP on the selected Path
END
Fig3: Flowchart of EV-AODV
The EV-AODV works as follows, when a source wants to
send a message to a destination the source initiates a route
discovery process, the source vehicle broadcasts RREQ
packets. The nearby vehicle receives this and checks in its
routing table for a route to the destination. if a route to the
destination is present it will send the path to the source if no
route found then it forwards the RREQ further. Now if the
RREQ is received by a mesh router it will increment the
counter value. The reserved four bits of AODV header is used
to store the counter value. Finally at the destination a path
with maximum mesh router count will be selected and RREP
will be sending on the selected path.
V. SIMULATION
Simulation is done in NS-2 simulator. The ns-2 accepts the
input file that has the information of each node and the
packets generated by each node. The time information of the
packets are also present in that source file. The simulation
parameter values are shown in table1.
Table 1.Simulation parameters
Parameter Value
Simulation time 900sec
Simulation area 1000*1000m
Propagation model Two ray ground reflection
Mobility model Random way point
Examined protocols A ODV &EV-AODV
Packet size 512bytes
Packet rate 32 pkts/s
N
The simulation results are shown in Figure for a range of
speeds. The results indicate that EV-AODV is able to
significantly reduce the packet loss compared to standard
AODV. During route establishment, EV-AODV focuses on
However, standard AODV forms routes over multiple hops by
randomly selecting the channels which are available. Thus, a
route may consist of a large number overlapping and flooded
channels, resulting in severe packet losses. The lower packet
losses incurred by EV-AODV enable it to achieve a higher
packet delivery ratio than the standard AODV as shown in
Fig5.The standard AODV protocol, due to a high packet loss,
is unable to achieve a good put with increasing client speeds.
As mentioned earlier, the standard AODV protocol forms
routes using random channels rather than selecting optimal
channels available in the network. As a result, links get
saturated and suffer from interference. This essentially causes
the routes to sever, thereby causing new route discoveries.
Therefore there is an increase in the routing overhead due to
the repeated route discoveries. On the other hand, EV-AODV
selects optimal channels during the route establishment phase.
This enables the route to be effective for longer durations,
which minimizes the need for extraneous route discoveries as
shown in Fig 4. As the routes created by the EV-AODV have
been optimized for minimal interference and optimal load
distribution among parallel links, packets are sent promptly
without incurring excessive contention for the physical
medium. This has the effect of reduced average latency of the
data packets traversing an average of four hops as shown in

16
Fig 6. The packets flowing on routes established using AODV modifications result in a significant improvement of the key
face severe contention for the physical medium and are hence performance metrics evaluated for Vehicular Adhoc networks.
significantly delayed at each hop. The path optimality of the The simulation results show that under high mobility and
EV-AODV also remains higher than the standard AODV traffic load conditions, EV-AODV provides an improvement
protocol, due to the establishment of consistent routes during in terms of packet delivery rate, latency and routing overhead
the route discovery process.
over the standard AODV routing protocol.

5.5
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VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we have presented EV-AODV, a variant of the
AODV protocol, which makes effective use of the additional
capabilities offered by the Mesh Routers. Our simple

17