Evaluation of routing protocols for VANETs in urban environments

The past few years have seen an increasing interest in the development of vehicular ad hoc networks resulting in many routing protocols proposals. This paper presents the results of a detailed performance evaluation of three of these protocols selected from different categories: geographic routing (i.e., GPSR), geographic opportunistic routing (i.e., GOSR), and trajectory based routing (i.e., SIFT). We used VanetMobiSim/NS-2 simulation environment to compare the protocols performance under different node densities, speed and distance between source and destination nodes in urban traffic scenarios. We further extend SIFT to enable vehicle to infrastructure communications and show that it outperforms the other studied routing protocols for most of the performance metrics used in this paper.