Experimental performance comparison of single-path and multipath routing in VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are envisioned to support Intelligent Transportation Systems, providing services to drivers. VANETs comprise of vehicles equipped with wireless communication devices, and access points spread over streets and roads. VANETs require multi-hop routing protocols to data tranmission, following two main approaches in relation to the number of discovered routes. However, simulations mainly analyze their performance individually, without considering issues in experimental environments. Hence, this work presents an experimental performance analysis comparison between the single-path and the multipath routing approaches, aiming to understand their behavior in order to assist the design of efficient routing protocols. Evaluation scenarios employ static and low mobility situations, applying two major protocols from the literature to represent the routing approaches. Results confirm the advantages of multipath routing, which has shown a packet loss ratio reduction of four fold related to the single-path one under static scenarios, and about three fold under low mobility.