Performance analysis of routing protocols for vehicular adhoc networks using NS2/SUMO

Development of intelligent transportation system is the need of all the developing countries where urbanization and industrialization is rapidly growing. VANETs are being used as a tool for improving road safety by alarming the drivers about accidents occurred ahead of them or for providing internet access to the passengers via gateways along the road. Due to highly dynamic nature of nodes in VANETs, designing a routing protocol for VANET is quite challenging compared to MANET environment. Researchers have suggested several routing mechanism for VANETs. Few routing decision are based on topology based selection whereas others have considered different parameters like location information of nodes, traffic lights etc. As no benchmarking scheme is available for choosing a routing protocol in VANET, this article gives an insight on how to choose a routing protocol depends on varying condition of traffic. Three popular protocols AODV, DSR and LAR have been chosen for analysis on varying traffic environment. All the three protocols have been critically tested for different metrics such as Throughput, Packet Delivery Ratio and Routing overhead during the simulation. Simulation is carried out with the help of open-source simulation tools NS2, a network simulator, and SUMO, a traffic simulator.