Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) using WLAN technology have recently received considerable attention. The evaluation of VANET routing protocols often involves simulators since management and operation of a large number of real vehicular nodes is expensive. We study the behavior of routing protocols in VANETs by using mobility information obtained from a microscopic vehicular traffic simulator that is based on the on the real road maps of Switzerland. The performance of AODV and GPSR is significantly influenced by the choice of mobility model, and we observe a significantly reduced packet delivery ratio when employing the realistic traffic simulator to control mobility of nodes. To address the performance limitations of communication protocols in VANETs, we investigate two improvements that increase the packet delivery ratio and reduce the delay until the first packet arrives. The traces used in this study are available for public download.
In an ad hoc network each host (node) participates in routing packets. Ad hoc networks based on 802.11 WLAN technology have been the focus of several prior studies. These investigations were mainly based on simulations of scenarios involving up to 100 nodes (usually 50 nodes) and relaxed (too unrealistic) data traffic conditions. Many routing protocols in such setting offer the same performance, and many potential problems stay undetected. At the same time, an ad hoc network may not want (or be able) to limit the number of hosts involved in the network. As more nodes join an ad hoc network or the data traffic grows, the potential for collisions and contention increases, and protocols face the challenging task to route data packets without creating high administrative load. The investigation of protocol behavior in large scenarios exposes many hidden problems. The understanding of these problems helps not only in improving protocol scalability to large scenarios but also in increasing the throughput and other QoS metrics in small ones. This paper studies on the example of AODV and DSR protocols the influence of the network size (up to 550 nodes), nodes mobility, nodes density, suggested data traffic on protocols performance. In this paper we identify and analyze the reasons for poor absolute performance that both protocols demonstrate in the majority of studied scenarios. We also propose and evaluate restructured protocol stack that helps to improve the performance and scalability of any routing protocol in wireless ad hoc networks.
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