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Improved Geographical Routing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Kayhan Zrar Ghafoor Jaime Lloret Ali Safa Sadiq

Marwan Aziz Mohammed

the date of receipt and acceptance should be inserted later

Abstract Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) has emerged to establish communication between intel-
ligent vehicles. The high mobility of vehicles and existing of obstacles in urban area make the commu-
nication link between vehicles to be unreliable. In this environment, most geographical routing protocols
does not consider stable and reliable link during packet forwarding towards destination. Thus, the network
performance will be degraded due to large number of packet losses and high packet delay. In this paper,
we propose an improved geographical routing protocol named IG for VANET. The proposed IG incorpo-
rates relative direction between source vehicle and candidate vehicles, distance between candidate node
and destination and beacon reception rate in order to improve geographical greedy forwarding between
intersection,. Simulation results show that the proposed routing protocols performs better as compared to
the existing routing solution.
Keywords V2V Communications Geographical Routing Greedy Routing Link Reliability Link
Stability

1 Introduction

The topic of vehicular networks has merged as a promising field of study and gained the attention of
many researchers from both academia and industry. The deployment of such important system will open
up a flourish path for safer driving experience [1, 2, 3]. For instance, vehicles in the vicinity can exchange
information for collision avoidance and traffic flow control. This will probably decrease death tolls on the
roads. Although the main aim of VANET is to provide safe traffic flow, enabling infotainment applications
is also crucial to be taken its place. With these unique applications, vehicular networks offer great services
to the drivers, passengers and traffic systems. Efficient data forwarding is considered as corner stone to the
practicality of these aforementioned applications.
Packet routing has a an essential role that affects the performance of vehicular networks. Clearly, in
contrast to topology based routing, geographical routing provides long distance packet forwarding, which
is counted as a departure from short to long distance communication. Moreover, many research works
have witnessed the scalability and robustness of geographical routing protocols in high mobility vehicular

Kayhan Zrar Ghafoor

Faculty of Engineering, Koya University, Daniel Miterrand Boulevard, Koya, KOY45, Kurdistan Region-Iraq.
Tel.: +964-750-4499850
E-mail: kayhan@ieee.org
Jaime Lloret
Departamento de Comunicaciones, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia Camino de Vera s/n, 46022, Valencia, Spain.
Ali Safa Sadiq
UTM-MIMOS Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Telecommunication Technology Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universiti
Teknologi Malaysia, Johor, Johor Bahru, Skudai, 81310.
Marwan Aziz Mohammed
Software Engineering, Colleg of Engineering, Salahaddin University-Hawler 44002 SUH, Kirkuk Road-Erbil, Kurdistan
Region-Iraq.
2 Kayhan Zrar Ghafoor et al.

environment [4,5,6,7,8,9]. Such routing protocols use position information of candidate nodes to forward
data packets toward destination. Particularly, packet carrier node selects a neighbour node whose distance
to the specified destination is shortest as compared to other neighbour nodes. In this way, a candidate node
with greater progress toward destination would be chosen in each step of packet forwarding.

Fig. 1: Problem of greedy-based packet forwarding

This kind of routing, however, degrades the performance of network in realistic VANET. The reason is
that as the distance between a source and a next candidate node increase, the rate of both signal attenuation
and packet loss increases [10,11]. Ultimately, two things happen: the network suffers in terms of successful
packet delivery rates and the control overhead profoundly increases. Fig. 1 shows the issue of greedy
packet forwarding toward the destination D. As en-route node R has shortest distance toward the destination
among other direct neighbors, it is selected by the source to forward the data packets. But, during packet
transmission, the link between them breaks due to high signal attenuation. Furthermore, the authors in [12,
13,14] are assured the existence of volatile links between vehicles due to high speed of vehicles and error
prone wireless channel. Thus, it is important to consider a routing protocol which favors the wireless link
quality during packet forwarding besides packet progress towards destination.
In the brief discussion explained above, it is clear that a trade-off between link quality, packet progress
and vehicular mobility characteristics are necessary in multi-hop routing over vehicular networks. This
paper proposes an Improved Geographical (IG) routing protocol for optimal packet forwarding between
intersections in urban VANET. More particularly, the proposed IG considers the parameters such as rela-
tive direction between source vehicle and candidate vehicles, distance between candidate vehicle and the
destination, and beacon reception rate in order to improve geographical greedy forwarding. The proposed
routing protocol has been modeled and simulated using JiST/SWANs [15] simulation tool for performance
evaluation. It is noteworthy that our proposed multi-hop geographical routing protocol is well suited for
many applications. For instance, in comfort-related applications, it can be used for chatting, gaming, file
sharing or infotainment between vehicles. For technical standpoint, we summaries the most important con-
tributions of this paper:
In the harsh VANET environment, sub-optimal routing might happen in case of only considering single
metric in data packet forwarding. Thus, this paper proposes an improved multi-metric geographic rout-
ing (IG) protocol that trade off between packet progress toward destination, link quality and stability.
Considering the fact that wireless link between vehicles is unstable, in contrast to most routing pro-
tocols, the IG protocol favors a candidate vehicle that has stable link with the source during packet
forwarding.
We implemented and evaluated the proposed IG protocol and then compared with existing routing solu-
tions. The comparison shows superiority of our proposed routing solution as compared to the RBVT-R,
GPCR and AODV.
The rest of the paper is arranged as follows: Section 2 provides the literature review on recent geo-
graphical routing protocols. Section 3 highlighted an overview of the proposed protocol and also discusses
the detail of IG protocol. This is followed by performance validation and evaluation in section 4, where
we highlight the feasibility of our protocol by considering a urban vehicular scenario and realistic wireless
channels. Finally, section 5 concludes the paper.

2 Related Work

Packet routing is important for the design of VANET since several applications are relying on this unicast
communication such as file sharing between two vehicles. Geographical routing primitively developed
IGRP in VANET 3

for packet radio networks in 1987 [16]. This type of routing received revived interest during the last few
years in mobile and vehicular wireless networks [17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23]. In geographical routing, packet
forwarding decisions by a node are based mainly on the position of direct neighbors and the position of
the packets destination. These protocols, specifically developed for MANET, cannot be directly applied in
vehicular networks. The principle is quite simple, because the movement of vehicles is constrained by the
roads, and the paths are allowed by the environment. Furthermore, a large number of vehicles are traveling
on the highway/urban vehicular environments. As a result, VANET routing protocols must utilize localized
information to achieve the scalability requirements. Then, vehicles make packet forwarding decisions based
solely on local information provided by nearby direct neighbors. This leads to less control overhead due to
the suppression of the nodes global knowledge of other parts of the network.
One of the well known routing solution is GPSR [24] that is a position-based routing because it utilizes
the positions of the vehicles and the location of the packets destination when making forwarding decisions.
GPSR forwards packets in two modes: greedy mode and perimeter mode. In greedy mode, an intermediate
node receives a packet, and then selects a neighbor node that is geographically closest to the destination
node. If an intermediate node has no other neighbors closer to the destination than itself, it enters a local
maximum. In this case, the packet will switch to the perimeter mode to recover from the local optimum.
The successor of GPSR routing solution is GPCR [25]. GPCR is a geographical routing protocol that
forwards packets to a neighbor node which has the closest distance to the destination (greedy mode of
packet forwarding). In the perimeter mode, a node forwards packets to the next neighbor node by applying
right hand rule. In addition, GPCR assumes that the road traffic is the planar graph, which utilizes the
concept of junction nodes to control the next road segments that packets should follow. Following the trend,
Lochert et al. (2003) in [26] proposed a geographical routing protocol named GSR. This routing mechanism
integrates geographical routing supported by city maps. If the position of the destination, position of the
source and the map of the city is given, GSR determines the number of junctions the packet should follow.
Then the protocol applies Dijkstras algorithm to find the shortest possible path toward a destination. After
determining a sequence of junctions, the protocol utilizes greedy routing to forward data packets at the
roads. That is, a packet carrier node selects a candidate node which is closest to the next intersection. The
protocol continues to forward packets in this way until the destination is reached or the life time of the
packet is expired. The aforementioned routing solutions did not consider the multi-metric score function to
forward packets toward the specified destination.
A positive step toward efficient routing protocols is taken by the authors in [27], where the authors pro-
posed RBVT, which leverages on-board navigation systems to establish paths between the source and the
destination through a sequence of intersections with high network connectivity. Furthermore, geographical
forwarding is proposed to forward data packets between two consecutive junctions on the path. RBVTs
route discovery and route reply is similar to the CAR protocol. RBVT, however, uses real-time vehicular
traffic information so as to make nodes aware of the city map. This increases RBVTs robustness and adapt-
ability to network conditions. Besides, since it considers road-based paths and geographical forwarding, the
selected route should be stable. This class of routing protocol consists of two different protocols based on
routing demand and these are known as reactive and proactive protocols. Reactive protocol (RBVT-R)
makes route discovery decisions on demand (like reactive topology-based routing protocols) and reports to
the source with a route reply which includes a list of traversed junctions. RBVT-P creates and maintains the
route pro-actively by transmission of periodic Connectivity Packets (CPs). These packets visit connected
road segments and cache the topology that they traversed. All nodes utilize this information to determine
the shortest path to the destination. Fig. 2 shows the main concept of both classes of RBVT routing proto-
col. The RBVT creates a path (S, I1 , I2 , I3 , I4 , D), whereas the shortest path solutions forward data packets
through a route (S, I1 , I3 , I4 , D) that would lead to route break. The RBVT routing solution performed well
in urban vehicular environment. However, the metrics that are considered in this paper are not utilized for
packet forwarding toward the destination.
In the performance evaluation, the results show that both classes of RBVT perform better than each
of the AODV, GSR, OLSR and GPSR. Furthermore, the RBVT-P is more reasonable for delay-sensitive
applications, whereas RBVT-R can be used for applications that require high throughput. However, since
RBVT requires the exchange and maintenance of non-local information, it leads to high network overhead.
Data packet headers carry a list of junctions that the packets should follow. It might lead to un-scalability
issues. Furthermore, in their optimized geographical forwarding, the direction of vehicles is not taken into
consideration. Another direction to forward data packets optimally over urban vehicular environments is
taken by [28] where the authors proposed an improved vehicular ad hoc routing protocol for city environ-
4 Kayhan Zrar Ghafoor et al.

Fig. 2: RBVT routing concept

ments (GyTAR). The designed protocol has two modes of operation: routing at the intersections and at
road segments. For the former mode, GyTAR reactively selects neighbor intersections upon consideration
of variations in traffic density and the distance to the destination.
The authors in [5] proposed DIR protocol for routing packets in urban vehicular scenario. The DIR
protocol consists of three phases- destination discovery, packet forwarding, and route maintenance- to route
packets efficiently towards the destination. The simulation results from the performance evaluation show
that the proposed routing protocol, compared to CAR, can improve end-to-end packet delay, packet delivery
ratio, and network throughput. However, the periodic maintenance of link cost (expected packet forwarding
delay) between forwarding diagonal intersections ( f rom Ixi,yi to Ix j,y j ) leads to bandwidth overhead traffic
and hence negatively creates an impact on the end-to-end data transfer performance. The protocol is also
susceptible to un-scalability issues, not just due to the bandwidth overhead of finding link costs, but also
on finding a list of anchor points between source and destination.
In [10], Lee et al. proposed TO-GO, which is a geographic routing protocol that exploits local infor-
mation of 2-hop neighbors via beaconing to select the best target forwarder and incorporates opportunistic
forwarding with the best chance to reach it. The authors divided TO-GO into three algorithms: Next-hop
Prediction Algorithm (NPA), which determines the target node in the same road segment of the data source,
the Forwarding Set Selection algorithm (FSS) determines the nodes that are contributing in the forwarding
set and priority scheduling algorithm selects the best candidate node (which is closer to the target node) in
the forwarding set.
All aforementioned routing solutions were proposed to address a specific problem for the sake of im-
proving the performance of packet forwarding. However, none of them have considered multi-metric for
packet forwarding a long streets in urban vehicular environment. More specifically, none of the above rout-
ing solutions have considered the combination of relative direction between source vehicle and candidate
vehicles, distance between candidate node and destination, and beacon reception rate. To this end, we pro-
posed an improved geographical routing protocol that favors link quality, packet forwarding progress and
stability of links between vehicles.

3 Assumptions of the Proposed Protocol

The proposed IG routing protocol is implemented inside vehicles that are traveling in infrastructure-less ve-
hicular environment. In this environment, it is reasonable to assume that all vehicles are equipped with the
Global Positioning System (GPS) services and digital road map, i.e. each vehicle knows its own position,
coordinates of the junctions and road segments. This assumption is valid since in the near future most ve-
hicles will be intelligent and equipped with on-board navigation systems. It is also assumed that the source
and intermediate vehicles should have the coordinates of the destination node to make packet forward-
ing decisions. In the IG protocol, vehicles are aware about position coordinates and direction information
of nearby vehicles by periodically broadcasting beacon messages. This process enables the cognizances
among nearby vehicles and helps efficient packet forwarding decision at and between intersections. Par-
ticularly, at the intersections, the packet routing decision lies on the traffic density of the next candidate
street and distance of an intersection to the destination, which allows to select the most suitable candidate
road segment. After a best junction is chosen, the packet carrier node ranks the neighbor nodes based on
multi-metric forwarding decision, i.e. the packet forwarding progress, beacon reception rate, and relative
direction between the candidate and the packet carrier node. Moreover, we assume that there will be enough
vehicles (the vehicular traffic is not sparse) in the urban vehicular environment during packet forwarding.
IGRP in VANET 5

3.1 Proposed IG Routing Protocol

Packet routing from source to a destination based on a single metric might be sub-optimal due to fast
changing of vehicular topology. Many measures affect a wireless link between vehicles such as reliabil-
ity, stability, and packet forwarding progress. When vehicles are traveling on the road segments between
intersections, a source vehicle can determine a best preferable intermediate vehicle based on the assigned
probability, which is an output of the score function.
Fig. 3 illustrates the detail of IG protocol. Firstly, the vehicles in the urban scenario exchange hello
packets for handshaking and hence knowing the mobility characteristics of each other. After hello packet
communication, a packet carrier node checks whether it is at the intersection or between them. If the packet
carrier vehicle is traveling between intersections, it starts to measure the BRR, compute the relative direc-
tion and forwarding progress for all immediate neighbor vehicles. Then, the packet carrier node determine
the score function value of the neighbor vehicle with its radio communication range. Through the deter-
mined value of score function, the packet carrier node ranks neighbor vehicles and this selection procedure
determines how good the candidate neighbor is to forward the packet towards the specified destination.
Moreover, at the intersection the packet carrier vehicle considers the traffic density of the next road seg-
ments and curvature distance between next intersection and packet destination.
The detail of three metrics, relative direction between source vehicle and candidate vehicles, distance
between candidate vehicle and the destination, and beacon reception rate, are illustrated in the following
sections.
1) ForwardingProgress(FP): When a packet carrier vehicle is between intersections, it computes
Forwarding Progress of the intermediate vehicles. This metric indicates the packet forwarding progress
towards the destination and it is computed by Ds /Di where Di is the distance of an intermediate vehicle to
the destination and Ds is the distance of the source vehicle to the destination. Source vehicle gives higher
priority to an intermediate vehicle that has maximum value of Forwarding Progress. Hence an intermedi-
ate vehicle will be selected that is approaching the destination with high packet forwarding progress. We
considered advancement of packet forwarding since it is the most widely adopted in geographical forward-
ing. However, only adopting this parameter for packet forwarding decisions might lead to routing loop
phenomena.
2) Direction (D): In vehicular environment, vehicles are traveling in the same or opposite directions,
thus their direction is restricted by the streets and intersections. Due to this bipolar movement of vehicles,
vehicles that are traveling in the same direction have stable route as compared to the vehicles that they
travel in opposite direction. Therefore, we consider this vehicular mobility characteristic to make the source
vehicle to give higher priority to an intermediate vehicle that travel in the same direction with source. The
relative direction between a vehicle and a single coordinate is computed by determining the angle between
direction vector of a vehicle and x-axes [29].
Furthermore, since wireless channel between vehicles is error prone, the channel quality is also should
be considered in packet forwarding decisions.
3) Beacon Reception Rate(BRR): The packet delivery of wireless channels between vehicles can be
measured by beacon reception rate. Beacon message is a broadcast frame which is transmitted periodically
(at stipulated interval T ) by vehicles. We utilized number of beacon messages that have been received by
a vehicle to determine link quality. In essence, an interval is defined and named Reception Rate Interval
(RRI) in which a vehicle counts number of beacon messages that is received in RRI. With recording number
of beacon messages in RRI, each vehicle can compute Beacon Reception Rate (BRR) as follows:

BRR =
BeaconsRRI(V ) (1)
RRI
T

where BeaconsRRI(V ) denotes number of received beacons from one hop neighbor vehicles and RRI T is
defined as number of beacons that should be received in RRI. Equ.1 provides a perspective to vehicles on
the actual number of beacons that have been received in a stipulated time interval. For instance, if beacon
broadcast interval is 0.5 second, RRI is 7 second and number of received beacons is 10 second. The BRR
of a vehicle is 0.714.
The proposed routing protocol ranks neighbor intermediate vehicles according to the above three
routing metrics. But, a score function is necessary to combine all metrics in a single one. This score
6 Kayhan Zrar Ghafoor et al.

Fig. 3: Flowchart of the proposed IG protocol

function favors link quality, packet progress towards destination and link stability instead of consider-
ing only a single metric for packet forwarding. We adopt the multi-metric scoring function which was
proposed in [21] to combine FP, D and BRR metrics. Assume that a score function combines k routing
metrics j = {j1 ,j2 ,j3 , ...,jk }. For each jk , intermediate vehicles have minimum and maximum values
[jkmin ,jkmax ]. Hence, the score function is defined as follows [21]:

f (j1 ,j2 , ...,jk ) = X j11 j22 j3 3 .....jki + SPmax (2)

where SPmax stands for selection probability and denotes maximum value of the score function f (j1 ,j2 , ...,jk ),
X is defined as a variable that depends on the maximum value of routing metrics and weights, and (1 , 2 , 3 ...., i )
are denoted as weights that are used to give higher priority to a specific routing metric. In the proposed IG
IGRP in VANET 7

protocol, three metrics have been considered for packet forwarding decisions. Thus, the probability value
of an intermediate vehicle selection is calculated as follows:

f (FPj , D j , BRR j ) = X FPj1 Dj 2 BRR j 3 + SPmax (3)
The f (FPj , D j , BRR j ) value reaches maximum when their derivative equal to zero. Thus, X is expressed
as follows:
SPmax
X= 1 3 (4)
FPmax Dmax
2
BRRmax
The evaluation of equation 3 requires the maximum value of FPj , D j and BRR j . The maximum value
of FPj can be determined based on the radio coverage of vehicles and simulation area. Hence, the FPmax is
equal to (10). Furthermore, the maximum value of D j depends on cos ( is the angle between direction
vector of the candidate node and x-axis). Thus, Dmax is 1. Moreover, BRR ranges from 0 to 1, thus the
maximum value of BRR is 1.

0.8

0.6
SP

0.4

0.2

0
10
1
0.8
5 0.6
0.4
0.2
0 0
FP BRR

Fig. 4: Correlation between FPj , BRR j and SP variables (1 = 0.91, 2 = 0.47, 3 = 0.5).

If the maximum probability (SPmax ) for intermediate vehicle selection is 1 (the probability range is
starting from 0 to 1), 1 = 0.91, 2 = 0.47, 3 = 0.5 and then we use equation 4 to compute the value of
X which yields 0.1230. Therefore, we can calculate the intermediate vehicle selection probability (SP),
based on equation 3, which is equal to 0.4678. This probability (0.4678) is the value that computed by the
packet carrier vehicle in order to rank intermediate neighbor vehicles i.e., the packet carrier vehicle ranks
a vehicle with this value and other intermediate vehicles implement the ranking process in similar way.
It is worth to mention that a source vehicle leverages the score function (equation 3) to rank intermediate
neighbor vehicles. Moreover, for theoretical analysis the values of weights are constant, but they optimally
could be determined in the performance evaluation.
Furthermore, Fig. 4 depicts the relationship between SP, FP and BRR variables. The trend shows that
the SP decreases to minimum when the value of BRR is 1 and FP is 10. An intermediate vehicle with SP
value , is close to the destination node, has a reliable link quality with the source and is traveling with the
same direction of the source. It is noteworthy that a vehicle with lower value of SP has a higher priority and
would be selected by the source as a candidate relay node.
The proposed IG protocol consists of two modes of packet routing in the urban vehicular scenario.
Previous sections presented packet routing between intersections. At the intersections, vehicles use IG
routing protocol to decide which next road segment will be selected for packet forwarding. For this purpose,
IG protocol adapts the technique in [28] to select the next intersection. In essence, IG protocol dynamically
choses the next intersection by considering vehicular traffic estimation of next road segments and distance
to the destination.
8 Kayhan Zrar Ghafoor et al.

3.2 IG Protocol Packet Forwarding Example

IG protocol is an improved greedy geographical routing protocol that forwards packets through an optimal
path in urban vehicular scenarios. This section presents a vehicular scenario that illustrates the principle of
IG protocols packet routing at and between intersections. To ensure network connectivity, we assume that
the vehicular traffic density is not sparse i.e; enough vehicles are in the road segments.
As can be seen in Fig. 6, the source S is between intersections and intends to forwards packet to the
best quality neighbor vehicle (R1 , R5 , R4 , R2 , R3 , R7 ). First the source and the nearby vehicles exchange
hello messages whereby each vehicle posses mobility information about its neighbors. The source triggers
the score function 3 in order to rank the neighbor candidate vehicles. The node with lower value of SP will
be given a highest score and will selected as a next packet forwarder. In Fig. 6, the source gives highest
rank to (R2 ) as it has the best D, BRR and FP. Thus, we observe the importance of packet routing based
on relative direction between vehicles, beacon reception rate of neighbor vehicles and forwarding progress
towards the destination.
After the forwarding progress between intersections, vehicle R6 decides which intersection will be the
best to be selected as a best candidate for packet forwarding toward destination D . As we mentioned earlier,
junction vehicle (which is R6 in this example) uses the technique in [28] for next intersection selection by
considering traffic density and distance to the destination. Considering the scenario in Fig. 6 , R8 is selected
to forward packets toward destination.

4 Performance Evaluation

In the next section, we conduct experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol against
GPCR and RBVT-R with the use packet level simulator JIST/SWANS [15]. More particularly, we focus on
the simulation setup and results, comparison with the state of the arts and the utilized vehicular scenario.

4.1 Simulation Setup

The simulation of vehicles is conducted in 3968 1251 m rectangular area of Chicago city, which contains
370 road segments and 124 intersections (Fig. 7). In simulated urban scenario, random movement paths
of vehicles are adapted with the use of STreet RAndom Way point mobility model (STRAW) [30]. The
STRAW is suggested by many researchers as it has an efficient car movement path, lane changing model
and traffic density controller. Furthermore, STRAW is designed as a way to generate vehicles and they
move and pause for a period of time at and between intersections.

0.9

0.8

0.7
SP

0.6

0.5

0.4
1
1
0.8
0.5 0.6
0.4
D 0.2 BRR
0 0

Fig. 5: Relationship between input and output variables (1 = 0.91, 2 = 0.47, 3 = 0.5).
IGRP in VANET 9

Fig. 6: The illustration of packet forwarding of IB protocol. At the intersection, the receiver C elect itself
as a next relay hop, whereas between intersections the node A, BandF wins the contention phase.

In the simulated scenario, we considered a vehicular density of 100 to 350 nodes and each of them gen-
erate a beacon message per 0.5 second. The size of generated packets is set to 512 bytes as it is configured
in many studies such as [31]. The communication range of vehicles is set to 300 meter. Moreover, vehicles
are traveling with a speed of 40 to 70 km/hour a long the urban streets. The date rate is configured to 2
Mb/s as this value is proved to be robust [31, 6]. Furthermore, the IEEE 802.11b standard is used to model
MAC layer [27,31].
In addition, Nakagami radio propagation model [32] is utilized at the physical layer to compute fading
characteristics of the wireless channels between vehicles. This fading model is recommended by many
researchers as the output data of this model is more close to the experimental data of real world mobile
communication environment [33]. In Nakagami model, each signal component has its own received signal
strength as it travels through multi-path from source to a destination with different medium propagation
characteristics. We considered medium fading intensity of the simulated urban environment.
The total time of each simulation run is configured to 450 seconds. This time is contained 50 second at
the initial phase of simulation to suppress the effect of transient behavior on the results. This total simulation
time is also included 50 second of stop sending packets from the end of the simulation. All obtained results
represents the average of 15 simulation runs and 96 % confidence interval. The configuration of simulation
parameters are summarized in Table 1. These parameters are selected based on the studies as their simulated
vehicular scenario are realistic [31,34,35,36].
To evaluate the performance of IG routing protocol, we implemented the state of the arts routing so-
lutions (GPCR [25] and RBVT-R [27] in the same traffic model and vehicular scenario. Then, they used
as a benchmark for comparison purpose with the proposed IG protocol. The performance metrics that are
utilized to evaluate the proposed and state of the arts protocols are given as follows: 1) Packet Delivery
Ratio (PDR) is used to measure the fraction of data packets that are successfully received by the destination
to those generated by traffic source, 2) End to end delay is defined as the total time required by all the
packets to travel from the source to the destination. The packet delay obtained in the simulation is the sum
of sending buffer, medium access (packets delay due to interface queue), re-transmission, relay election
and propagation delay and 3) Hop count is defined as the average number of relay nodes that forward data
packets to the destination.

Fig. 7: A snapshot of Chicago city environment during simulation

10 Kayhan Zrar Ghafoor et al.

Table 1: Simulation parameters

Parameters Value
Network Simulator JIST/SWANS
Simulation time 450 s
Simulation area 3968 m 1251 m
Mobility model STRAW
Propagation model Nakagami
Traffic Density 100-350 nodes
Vehicle velocity 40-70 km/hr
Transmission range 300 m
Maximum packet generation rate 6 packet/second
Maximum number of source nodes 15
Channel bandwidth 2 Mbps
MAC protocol IEEE 802.11b DCF
Data packet size 512 bytes
Weighting factors (1 , 2 , 3 ) (0.01, 0.01, 0.01)

Different experiments are conducted to show the impact of mobility and network parameters on the
proposed protocol and state of arts routing solutions.

4.2 The Impact of Traffic Density

This experiment shows the effect of increasing traffic density on the performance of IG and the state of
the arts protocols. Through this study, we can observe how routing solutions sustain the increase of traffic
density. Before conducting the aforementioned study, the value of vehicle speed is fixed to 50 km/hour and
the number of packet source vehicles is configured to 15 whereas in this experiment vehicular traffic is
varying from 100 to 350 nodes.

Fig. 8 presents the effect of traffic density on the performance of routing protocols. Fig. 8a shows the
results of successful packet delivery for all routing solutions. PDR trend of GPCR present low performance
especially at low traffic density. This is because GPCR utilizes greedy forwarding strategy to select a
candidate vehicle that has shortest path to the packet destination. In some occasions, the wireless link
between source and selected next hop will be very weak (move out the radio range). This phenomena will
lead to fewer packet forwarding to a specified destination. However, with increasing the traffic density
GPCR forwards more successful packets toward destination. Furthermore, both AODV and RBVT-R tend
to perform good when the number of vehicles are increasing in the network. This is due to the fact that with
increasing traffic density, network connectivity increases and hence packet forwarding will be improved.
With increasing number of nodes, GPCR lags behind the AODV protocol due to the occurrence local
optimal in GPCR, which causes more overhead on the protocols to find another candidate neighbor vehicle.
On the other hand, the IG protocol performs the best among state of the arts routing solutions. This is
because IG protocol favors link quality, forwarding progress and mobility characteristics.
IGRP in VANET 11

(a) Packet delivery ratio.

(b) Average packet delay.

(c) Average path length.

Fig. 8: Effect of varying vehicular traffic density on the performance of IG, GPCR, AODV and RBVT-R
protocols
12 Kayhan Zrar Ghafoor et al.

Another interesting performance measure is the average packet delay, which is shown in Fig. 8b. This
metric is utilized to assess the suitability of routing protocols for delay sensitive applications. We observe
that the average packet delay of IG protocol is smallest as compared with the studied protocols. The reason
is that IG protocol selects the best quality path towards destination and this will alleviate number of packet
losses due to unreliable network condition. However, we notice that average delay of IG protocol consis-
tently increase in high dense network. This is because IG protocol needs time to determine next candidate
node, which is close to the destination, has good BRR and has the same direction with packet source. On
the other hand, the delay trend of RBVT-R decreases as traffic density increases. This is because the estab-
lished route is still active for long period of time and hence leads to lower delay. Moreover, the occurrence
of local optimum and the process of searching best candidate among large number of neighbors causes the
GPCRs average delay increases in high traffic density.

Fig. 8c presents the relationship between hop count and the vehicular traffic density in medium fading
channel condition. In oder to compare the path length of the proposed IG protocol with the state of the arts,
we observe that the routed packet by using IG protocol needs more hop towards destination as compared to
the GPCR. But, shorter path does no represent good quality route towards packet destination. For this rea-
son, our proposed protocol performs better in terms of packet delivery ratio and average delay as compared
to GPCR protocol.

4.3 The Impact of Packet Size

In order to illustrate the effect of data packet size on the performance of routing solutions, we conducted
experiments in the same vehicular scenario as in the aforementioned section. We configured the vehicular
traffic density to 200 nodes and changing the packet size from 256 to 2048 bytes.
IGRP in VANET 13

(a) Packet delivery ratio.

(b) Average packet delay.

(c) Average path length.

Fig. 9: Effect of varying data packet size on the performance of IG, GPCR and RBVT-R protocols

Fig. 9 presents the effect of packet size on the performance of our proposed and existing routing solu-
tions (GPCR and RBVT-R). As expected, the trend of protocols show that the performance of network is
degraded as the packet size is increased. The responsibility of routing solutions performance degradation is
that the larger the packet size leads to the higher bandwidth resource consumption and high saturation on
the wireless channel.
14 Kayhan Zrar Ghafoor et al.

(a) Packet delivery ratio variation with simulation time for

different weighting factors.

(b) Average packet delay with simulation time for different

weighting factors.

Fig. 10: Effect of weighting factors on the performance of IG protocol

As shown in Fig. 9a, the packet delivery ratio for all protocols are acutely decreasing. But, the drop in
packet delivery for GPCR is larger than RBVT-R and IG protocol due to huge traffic load on the wireless
channel and leads to high packet loss of GPCR. More particularly, data packets is fragmented during its
transmission along the network. The whole packet will be useless if a fragment is lost and this cause a failure
of packet delivery process towards destination. If the packet forwarding status fails, the routing protocol
should determine another intermediate candidate vehicle. This will cause more control overhead that will
consume bandwidth similar to the increasing of data packet size. Furthermore, when the transmitted packet
size is set to 1024 byte and 2048 byte, the RBVT-R performs better in comparison with the IG protocol. The
reason is that the IG protocol favors multi-metric for packet forwarding and this relay node selection process
in a traffic density of 200 nodes more quickly leads to wireless channel saturation and thus contributes this
performance degradation of IG protocol. On the other hand, the packet delay of GPCR slightly increases as
compared to RBVR-R and IG protocol due to the loss of some high latency data packets (Fig. 9b). In the
other words, the lost packets due to high latency did not contribute the total average packet delay.
IGRP in VANET 15

4.4 The Impact of the 1 , 2 , 3 ,

This section shows the sensitivity of the 1 , 2 , 3 on the performance of the proposed protocol. This
experiment is conducted for different values of weighting factors in order to find the best value of 1 , 2 , 3
and hence the fairness of favoring routing metrics is obtained. In Fig. 10a and Fig. 10b, we illustrated
the impact of weighting factors on the successful delivery ratio and packet delay for different values of
1 , 2 , 3 .
In Fig. 10a and Fig. 10b, when the weighting factors 1 , 2 , 3 have the same value (0.4,0.4,0.4), the
IG protocol could forward more successful packets towards destination with low average delivery latency.
We state the reasons why configuring the values of 1 , 2 , 3 to 0.4,0.4 and 0.4 respectively shows better
performance. Firstly, as it is witnessed that sub-optimal of packet forwarding might occur if the packet
routing protocol is based on a single metric. This is happening when the IG protocol favors a single metric
by using a weight parameters in Fig. 10a and Fig. 10b. For example, between junctions, the IG protocol
gives high priority to the neighbor nodes that have short path and more directed to the destination (setting
1 , 2 , 3 to 0.7,0.5 and 0.2). But, BRR routing metric is also important in order to find optimal and good
quality path selection. Secondly, the combined effect of weighting factors is important for ranking process
of intermediate nodes since it affects the value of probability scoring function.

5 Conclusions

To fulfill the requirements of efficient routing in VANET, we proposed an Improved Geographical (IG)
routing to efficiently route packets towards the destination. On one hand, the IG protocol considers link
quality and stability with fast development of packet forwarding as metrics for next hop selection between
intersections. On the other hand, The IG protocol reactively selects next intersections upon consideration
of variations in traffic density and the distance to the destination. The performance of the proposed routing
protocol has been analyzed based on the simulation. According to the simulation results, the IG protocol
performs the best in terms of percentage of delivered packets and average packet delay as compared with
GPCR, AODV and RBVT-R. The simulation results also proves that our protocol is viable solution and
could route packets in realistic environment as we considered medium fading intensity in the performance
evaluation.

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