Variations on intersection-based routing on top of a virtualization layer for vehicular ad-hoc networks

Many routing algorithms for vehicular ad-hoc networks have relied on geographic forwarding as a means to reduce the paths' sensitivity to individual vehicle movements. In recent years, the basic forwarding strategies have been refined to create road-based paths, connecting successive road intersections selected on the basis of the connectivity between them. Revisiting this idea, we present three different flavors of a new algorithm called VNIBR (Intersection-Based Routing on Virtual Nodes): reactive, proactive and encounter-based. These variations can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art routing algorithms by relying on a virtualization layer that transparently deals with the problems of mobility. We analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the new algorithms by means of simulations in urban scenarios with different vehicle densities, looking at overhead, packet delivery ratios and end-to-end delays.