A Simulation Study of Routing Protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks Based on OPNET

Routing protocols design is an important and essential issue for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. In this paper, a more realistic simulation environment is developed based on VanetMobiSim and OPNET, and the performance of several classical routing protocols such as Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR), Geographic Routing Protocol (GRP), Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV) and Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) in various network conditions is evaluated and compared. Network delay and network packet loss are simulated with different nodes' density. The simulation results show that DSR is not suitable for dense VANETs, while AODV and OLSR have better network adaptability in dense VANETs. The performance of GRP is inferior to AODV and OLSR.