An Efficient Next Hop Selection Scheme

for Enhancing Routing Performance

in VANETs

Driss Abada1(B) , Abdellah Massaq2 , and Abdellah Boulouz1

1
Laboratory LABSIV, Faculty of Sciences, Ibn Zohr University, Agadir, Morocco
drissmisr@gmail.com
2
Laboratory OSCARS, National School of Applied sciences,
Cadi Ayyad University, Marrakech, Morocco

Abstract. Link stability is one of the key parameters for routing in

vehicular ad hoc networks. Estimating this metric basing only on the
mobility parameters, and disregarding the impact of the wireless fading
channel may cause degradation in the routing performance. In this paper,
when channel fading is taken into consideration, we propose to estimate
first communication range, where the fading is above some threshold, and
then use it to measure link stability. A novel estimated stability metric
will be combined with link signal received quality to select potential next
hop, in order to make paths selected from vehicles to Internet gateway
more reliable in the network. The proposed approach is compared with an
existing mobility parameter based stability routing protocol. The results
show that there is a significant improvement in routing performance in
term of throughput and overhead.

Keywords: VANET · Routing · Link stability · Fading · RSS

Mobility

1 Introduction
Making efficient vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I)
communications in VANETs plays an important role in Internet access applica-
tions. IEEE 802.11p [1–3], also known as Wireless Access in Vehicular Environ-
ment (WAVE) protocol is an enhancement to the 802.11 physical layer (PHY)
and medium access control (MAC) to make inter-vehicular communication more
efficient in VANETs. This standard is used as groundwork for Dedicated Short
Range Communication (DSRC). It operates in the 5.9 GHz band and supports
both V2V and V2I communications. The maximum data rate supported by this
standard is 27 Mbps. The mobility supported is up to 200 kmph, making this
suitable for VANETs applications involving highway scenario. IEEE 802.11p
provides a short-range radio communication of approximately 300 m.
The dynamic topology in VANETs may be caused by the mobility of nodes
as well as by fading of the wireless link. Hop count-based routing protocols select
c Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
Á. Rocha and M. Serrhini (Eds.): EMENA-ISTL 2018, SIST 111, pp. 205–215, 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03577-8_24
206 D. Abada et al.

the shortest path length in term of a number of hops. However, these protocols
do not typically select a route with sufficient lifetime to maintain the longest pos-
sible duration of communication with the gateway, which makes existing routing
protocols basically designed for MANETs not suitable for VANETs. That’s why
many routing protocols are proposed to utilize a metric characterizing link sta-
bility to choose the most stable route in the network. In the one side, there are
protocols [5,6] that have based only on the mobility features given by GPS such
as, location, speed, direction and the fixed value of transmission range to mea-
sure link lifetime, and they ignored the impact of fading and quality of received
signal. As consequence, the routes selected suffer from continuous packet losses
and an increase of bandwidth consummation in the PHY, MAC, and network
layer. In the other side, recently, many contributions [7,8] focus their studies on
the inter-vehicle communication channel propagation models, such as Shadowing
model, Rician, and Rayleigh distributions. They have taken into consideration
the mobility and fading to estimate link stability, but those models are not more
appropriate to simulate the communication in VANETs.
In this work, we have modified contention-based forwarding scheme [6], to
take into account to channel fading and the quality of the received signal of a link.
We have integrated into the relay selection scheme, tow important features: link
stability and link quality in term of the received signal. Link stability is measured
using routing metric called effective link expiration time. This new metric is
measured using vehicles mobility information and effective communication range
which is estimated accurately taking into account to the fading channel statistics,
instead of the fixed value of transmission range. Next, effective link expiration
time is combined with link received signal quality (LRSQ), in order to select
potential relays in the networks. In this paper, we have based on the fuzzy logic
system to estimate the quality of link received signal.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Our proposed approach is
detailed in Sect. 2. In Sect. 3, we discussed the performance of our protocol.
Finally, we give the conclusion and future work directions in Sect. 4.

2 Route to the RSU Discovery

The RSU1 route discovery and maintenance procedure adopted in our routing
protocol are similar to that of routing protocol proposed in [6]. The RSUs
implemented in the road are used as gateways between a wired network (Internet)
and VANET, and each node in VANET wants to connect to the Internet, must
initially find a route to RSU. RSUs broadcast periodically an advertisement
message in its restricted geographic zone to inform the vehicles for its existence. If
one vehicle doesn’t receive any advertisement message from RSU or its neighbors,
a reactive discovery must be executed. In this case, an RSU solicitation message
is broadcasted by exactly the same mechanism as RSU advertisement message
until it is received by an RSU or any vehicle that is already aware of a route to
an RSU.
1
Road Side Unit is a fixed gateway used to connect VANETs to a wired network.
 An Efficient Next Hop Selection 207

2.1 Effective Communication Range

The radio communication range is a key parameter of how long two vehicles
can keep connected. On one side, direct communication over large distance will
allow vehicles to transmit messages from source to destination in less number
hop. As consequence, access channel contention will increase, transmission rate
will be low and many MAC retransmissions will be introduced. On the other
side, relaying data through a short-range occupies more bandwidth but reduces
interfering traffic and access channel waiting time than direct communication.
Nakagami-m distribution seems to be most suitable to model communication in
VANET networks [9]. Assuming that the received power denoted P is a random
variable that follows a Nakagami distribution under the fading channel model in
vehicular environments. The probability density function (PDF) for a signal to
be received with power x for a given average power at distance d, of the received
signal power x can be expressed as:
 m m−1  m
Ωd x x
fP (x) := exp − , x ≥ 0. (1)
m Γ (m) Ωd
where Γ (.) is the incomplete gamma function, and m denotes the fading
parameter.
The probability noted Pr that a signal x is successfully received, is deduced
from the probability that the packet’s received signal is stronger than the recep-
tion threshold Pth
 +∞  +∞  m m−1  m
Ωd x x
Pr {P ≥ Pth } := fP (x)dx = exp − dx (2)
Pth Pth m Γ (m) Ωd
Moreover, if m is considered a positive integer, we can pass from continue to
discreet domain, and the probability Pr can be written as:
 1  mPth k
m−1 
mPth

Pr {P ≥ Pth } := exp − . (3)
k! Ωd Ωd
k=0

In this paper, we assume that all vehicles have the same transmission power
and that the transmission power is constant Pt . For the path loss, we adopt
a quadratic path-loss according to the Friis model (path loss exponent = 2).
Therefore, in the absence of interferences, the average received power Ωd at a
distance d, and the reception threshold Pth which should, in average, be detected
in a distance equal to maximum communication range R are:
Ωd := KPt d−2 and Pth := KPt R−2 (4)
2
where K is a constant value K = G(4π) t Gr λ
2 L , λ is the wavelength of the transmission,

Gt and Gr are the transmitters and receivers antenna gains respectively, and L is
the path loss factor, usually set to 1. Substituting Ωd and Pth , the final expression
of formula 3 will be:
  2  m−1   2 k
d  1 d
Pr {d, R} := exp −m × −m . (5)
R k! R
k=0
208 D. Abada et al.

We define effective communication range (ECR) noted Re as the expected value

of wireless communication range R that can be derived as follows,
 +∞
Re := E [R] = (1 − FP (x)) dx (6)
0

where FP (.) represents the cumulative density function (CDF) which can be
written :
FP (x) := 1 − Pr {P ≥ Pth } (7)
Due to the mobility of nodes, the relative distance d varies at the times;
consequently, the probability varies with node movement. To account for this
random variation, we replace d in (5) with a continuous random variable Z,
which represents the distance between the sender and the receiver. Originated
from formula 5, the effective communication range can be reorganized as the
following:
 +∞   z 2  m−1
 1   z 2  k
Re := exp −m × −m dz. (8)
0 R k! R
k=0

Noted that the value of Re can be simply determined if the values of parameter
m and R are known.

2.2 Relay Selection Metrics

2.2.1 Effective Link Stability
The radio communication range and mobility parameters are the main factors
used to measure the duration that can be two vehicles remained in connection.
In this paper, we have considered routing metric called effective link expiration
time. This metric is defined as the time duration in which two vehicles at each end
of the link are within each other’s effective communication range in the VANET
network. In the other words, link lifetime in which the received signal power is
above an acceptable threshold. Assuming that vehicles are all equipped with GPS
devices, and each vehicle can know its position, its speed, and its direction param-
eters through GPS system [6]. Therefore, we can predict the period of time that
the connection can be maintained between these two vehicles. We consider two
vehicles i and j which are identified by coordinates (xi , yi ) and (xj , yj ), and move
with speed vi and vj , in directions θi , θj with respect to the x-axis, respectively.
For measuring effective link expiration time denoted Te , we modified the formula
in [6] that is often used to measure link expiration time as:

(a2 + c2 )Re2 − (ad − bc)2 − (ab + cd)

Te := (9)
a2 + c2
where,
a := vi cos θi − vj cos θj
b := xi − xj
c := vi sin θi − vj sin θj
d := yi − yj .
 An Efficient Next Hop Selection 209

Here, instead of using a fixed value of communication range R, we have replaced

it with an estimated value of effective communication range. Assumed that the
effective communication range is symmetric (i.e the value of Re estimated in
node j from i is the same value of Re measured in node i from j Reij = Reji ).
Since the values used in the selection mechanism must be between 0 and 1.
For this purpose we use a new function called effective stability function noted
Se that is dependent on effective link expiration time. So, we take advantage of
an exponential function proposed in [6] that satisfies the given criteria. Denote
the effective stability function:
 
Te
Se := 1 − exp − (10)
a
where a is a constant that defines the rate at which the function is rising. Note
that the longer is the Te , the closer should be the result of this function to 1,
and conversely, the smaller is the Te , the closer to 0 this function should be.
Upon reception of a message, vehicles compute the minimum effective link
expiration time and consider it as the lifetime of the route from them to the
gateway.

2.2.2 Effective Horizontal Distance Rate

Using effective link stability as routing metric, we will be sure that route selected
is most stable and lowest fade one. This will improve certainly network perfor-
mance especially in term of data throughput. However, such a path might have
many numbers of hops than the shortest one. When packet relaying involves
more hops, since the radio channel is shared among neighboring nodes in the
network, it will increase medium access contention, interference, congestion, and
packet collisions. Therefore, path length should also be considered when select-
ing a suitable path based on stability. For this purpose, another metric will be
incorporated. This metric called effective horizontal distance rate. It calculates
the amount of progress that the advertisement message has made in the opposite
direction of the movement. Therefore, the farthest vehicle, which received the
message successfully, will have a higher probability to retransmit than nearby
nodes. As consequence, integrating this metric will allow vehicles to select the
shortest path in term of hops. The effective horizontal distance rate noted De
between two vehicles i and j is defined as:
M in(dRSS ∗ cos (θij ) , Re )
De := (11)
Re
where dRSS is the inter distance calculated based on the average received signal
strength, θij is a relative angle direction θij := θi − θj , and Re is the effective
transmission range of vehicles.

2.2.3 Link Received Signal Quality

As it is explained previously, our relay selection mechanism aims to improve
relay selection by considering received signal strength (RSS). The relative speed
210 D. Abada et al.

between sender and receiver is a metric among others which has a good consis-
tency with RSS. The faster source vehicle moves towards to receiver, the faster
will be the increase in the link RSS. Similarly, the faster the source vehicle moves
away from the receiver, the faster will be the decline in the link RSS [10]. For this
purpose, we take advantage of the fuzzy logic system [11] which received signal
strength and mobility speed factors are the fuzzy inputs and link received signal
quality (LRSQ) is fuzzy output. Upon reception of advertisement message from
the previous node, each vehicle measures RSS of the packet and calculates RSS
factor (RSSF ) and mobility factor (M F ) as shown in the following formulas:
RSSth
RSSF := 1 − (12)
RSS

|vrel |
M F := 1 − (13)
vmax
where RSSth is the received signal strength threshold, vrel is relative speed
between receiver and source and vmax is the maximum speed in the network.
We assume that vehicles are all equipped with GPS devices and keep their speed
during prediction link lifetime. The input fuzzy variables of RSSF and MF are
classified into three levels. This grouping strategy gives more clues on the weak-
ness and strength of input variables and helps to generate more accurate output
data. ⎧
⎨ Good if RSSF > 80%
RSS Level = M edium if 40% < RSSF ≤ 80% (14)
⎩
Bad if 10% < RSSF ≤ 40%
⎧
⎨ F ast if M F ≤ 25%
M obility = M edium if 25% < M F ≤ 75% (15)
⎩
Slow if M F > 75%
Linguistic values of quality of link received signal depending on the mobility
regarding if the sender and receiver move towards or away from each other and
RSS level. Once the fuzzy values of MF(Mobility Factor) and RSSF (RSS Factor)
have been calculated, the receiver vehicle uses the IF/THEN rules2 to calculate
the linguistic value of LRSQ. Table 1 is used to mapping each linguistic value of
LRSQ to minimal and maximal numerical values. Upon reception message and
after decision if LRSQ is very good, good, medium, low or very low, the receiver
determines the values Min and Max according to Table 1 and then computes the
value of a coefficient of RSS (CRSS) which is integrated into the relay selection
as the metric selection. We define a CRSS as follows:

CRSS := rand(M in, M ax) (16)

The rand (A,B) function generates a random value between A and B to reduce
the probability of two or more candidates, to reply at the same time and thus
we will reduce packets duplication which is a major problem of CBF.
2
The fuzzy rules are given to Table 1 in our recent previous work [1].
 An Efficient Next Hop Selection 211

Table 1. Numerical values corresponding to LRSQ

LRSQ Very low Low Medium Good Very good

Min 0.01 0.21 0.41 0.61 0.81
Max 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 0.99

2.3 Next Hop Selection and Re-broadcasting Scheme

In this paper, the selection of next hop is performed by means of contention,
by adapting the contention-based forwarding (CBF) to our proposed approach.
Several approaches [12] are proposed to improve contention-based forwarding
in VANETs especially in the routing and emergency messages dissemination.
Routing in VANETs plays crucial role in performance of networks [13,14]. As
discussed previously, the contention-based forwarding (CBF) is more suitable
for VANETs than another type of routing approaches such as topology-based
routing, position-based forwarding. The CBF is a timer-based approach which
lets receiving nodes implicitly and independently participates in the relay selec-
tion procedure. All receiving nodes are considered as candidates and do not
forward the receiving message immediately, but postpone their broadcasting by
a given timer and enter in contention phase. The first receiving node, which
timer expires, immediately broadcasts the message and any node overhearing
that transmission cancels its timer and does not forward. As a consequence, only
a specific number of nodes in the network are allowed to forward the message,
which will reduce the overhead and collisions, and prevent broadcast storms in
the network.
In order to set a waiting time of each node, we have replaced default param-
eter of contention in CBF by a new function that satisfies our criteria. The
replacement function denoted F is constructed based on three routing metrics
explaining previously as follows:

F = (α × Se + (1 − α) × De ) × CRSS (17)

where α is a factor selected in [0, 1] to give more weight to one metric to another.
For the contention, each node when it receives advertisement message, it
computes F and set its timer t(.) using following formula:

t(F ) = W Tmax × (1 − F ) (18)

where W Tmax is a maximum waiting time. Note that more F takes high values,
more than the waiting time is small. Thus the node will have big chance to be
potential relay.

3 Simulation and Result

To evaluate the performance of our proposed approach, we have implemented our
routing protocol in Network Simulator NS2.33. We have compared our protocol
212 D. Abada et al.

with the protocol developed recently in [6] for connecting VANETs to Internet.
We have performed some simulations in order to evaluate our proposed approach
in term of throughput, and overhead by investigating the impact of varying the
mobility of nodes and the number of vehicles on the road.

3.1 Simulation Environment

Paper [4] gives insights on some measurements of the IEEE 802.11p MAC and
physical layer using NS2. The data rate is fixed to 6 Mbit/s. Using MOVE [4] and
SUMO [4] we have created our highway scenario of 8000 m with two lanes. The
simulation period in this work is 460 s and we wait for 100 s after the beginning
of the simulation as the warm-up period. All vehicles move from the one end of
the highway to another end in the same direction and 10 vehicles are selected
randomly to send CBR data at rate 20 packets/s to a node that is part of the
wired network and is connected to all the base stations which are connected in
the wired network. To simulate protocols we have scheduled RSU to broadcast
the advertisement message every 5 s in the predefined broadcast geographic zone
which has been considered to be a circle with a radius of 1000 m, and the message
is broadcasted in the opposite movement of nodes. All simulation environment
parameters are the same taken in our previous work [1].

3.2 Simulation Results

3.2.1 Varying Number of Vehicles
Firstly, we compare the performance of the routing protocols by changing the
number of nodes in the network. The maximum speed of vehicles is fixed at
30 m/s and the number of vehicular sources is fixed at 10 vehicles.
The simulation results for network throughput and overhead are shown in
the Fig. 1. It can be seen that while the network performance for all routing
protocols decreased with the increased number of vehicles on the road. The
performance degradation is due to the increased interference and congestion
when the number of vehicles increases. As it is shown in the figures, our enhanced
approach has better performances in term of throughput and control overhead in
the contrast of protocol proposed in [6]. This is due to the considering the impact
of fading statistics on the link stability. Moreover, combining link stability with
RSS based distance rate metrics in proposed next hop selection scheme makes
vehicles to connect to RSU through most stable, shortest and strongest route,
consequently, reduce network failure and increase network throughput. As shown
in the figure, integrating LRSQ as relay selection metric improves significantly
network performance, this is because the packets will arrive at the destination
with enough reception power, which makes the route more reliable. Consequently,
the network performances, especially in term of throughput, have been enhanced
by reducing packet loss.
 An Efficient Next Hop Selection 213

a) Throughput b) Normalize routing overhead

Fig. 1. Throughput and overhead comparison under different number of vehicles

3.2.2 Varying Maximum Speed

Secondly, we fixed the number of nodes at 200 vehicles and the number of vehic-
ular sources at 10 sources, to evaluate the performance of the routing protocols
with increasing maximum speed.
Figure 2 illustrates the network throughput and the normalized overhead
routing with varying maximum speed. For all of the routing protocols, perfor-
mances decrease with increasing vehicle mobility. As it is shown, the protocol
proposed in [6] is less efficient than our scheme, because, the former selects paths
composed of links with longer lifetimes, but the paths might include more fad-
ing. As consequence, the cost will be increased in term of packet loss and control
overhead routing. As shown in the figure, our scheme with RSS has significant
improvement of network performance. The reason behind this enhancement is
because of the selective processing of signals. Only strongest received signals,
will be treated at the routing layer, this improves significantly the network per-
formance especially in term of throughput.

a) Throughput b) Normalize routing overhead

Fig. 2. Throughput and overhead comparison under different maximum speed

214 D. Abada et al.

4 Conclusion and Future Work

In this paper, we have enhanced relay selection scheme taking into account sta-
bility, fading, path length, and quality of received signal. Simulation results show
that our enhancing relay selection scheme achieves better performance than pro-
tocol based only on mobility, over a range of network performance measures. In
the future work, we plan to evaluate our approach in more realistic scenar-
ios (highway and also the city) by increasing a speed of vehicles, a number of
vehicles and a number of vehicular sources. Although its easy deployment and
low cost, IEEE 802.11p technology provides very limited communication range,
which leads to install many RSUs in the road for connecting VANETs to the
Internet, especially in long highway and urban scenarios. We think in the future,
to couple our approach based on IEEE 802.11p with another wireless technology
offering large coverage areas, such as WiMAX, Long Term Evolution (LTE) or
802.11ad (5G) using mobile and fixed gateway in an heterogeneous network.

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