HybTGR: a hybrid routing protocol based on topological and geographical information in vehicular ad hoc networks

Due to rapid changes in topology and high mobility of vehicles, routing in vehicular ad hoc networks needs special mechanisms. Due to these features, traditional routing protocols that are mainly developed for mobile ad hoc networks do not function well in these type of networks. To improve the efficiency of data routing, geographical routing method has been proposed by the researchers that use geographical information of nodes in the routing process. But this method relies only on the geographical information of network nodes and usually uses a greedy idea that may not perform well in some network situations. The main objective of this paper is to propose a hybrid routing protocol based on both geographical and topological information in Vehicular ad hoc networks and selecting the optimal route for data transmission. In the proposed protocol, based on the parameters like moving speed, link lifetime, the number of vehicles present in the vicinity of the node and distance to the destination node, a weight value is assigned to each network node. In this method, if the weight of a neighbor node is higher than that of the source node, geographical routing is used and otherwise, topology-based routing method will be used. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol due to the use of geographical and topological information, has improved packet loss rate, throughput, end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio compared to LSGO, GpsrJ+ and GyTAR routing protocols.