Performance evaluation of reactive routing protocols in VANET

Node movement feature of Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) closely resembles with that of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) but its high speed mobility and unpredictable movement characteristics are the key contrasting feature from that of MANET. The similarity nature suggests that the prevailing routing protocol of MANET is very much applicable to VANET. However, on the same line, the dissimilarity characteristics result in frequent loss of connectivity. This necessitates upgradation of the existing routing protocols to adapt itself into VANET scenario. The key parameter that needs to be fed into these protocols is a realistic mobility model which contains criterion linked to speed, road intersections, traffic light effect etc. In this paper, we compare performances of reactive routing protocols named Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) and Ad hoc On Demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV) in VANET using different Mobility Models provided in VanetMobiSim framework. The performances are evaluated by varying mobility, number of sources and node speed while packet delivery fraction, end to end delay and normalized routing load are used as performance metrics. The simulations have shown that AOMDV performs comparatively better than DSR and AODV in different mobility models in terms of end to end delay as performance metric.