Towards the Use of XOR-Based Routing Protocols in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper we present a performance analysis of XOR¹ -based flat routing protocols in high mobility conditions, considering a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) formed in a highway scenario. First, we describe an XOR-based protocol that incorporates several adaptations of the existing XOR-based routing algorithms for wired networks, in order to cope with the network mobility. Then we propose an improved version of it, XORi, which modifies the protocol's information gathering process to accommodate the specific dynamic nature of VANETs topology. Finally, we evaluate the performance of XOR-based protocols with other topology-based routing protocols. Simulation results allow us to characterize the performance of this class of protocols through the comparison of the packet delivery ratio, end-to-end path delay and average number of path hops². When a moderate density of nodes is considered, simulations show that XOR-based algorithms achieve almost the same packet delivery rate as link state algorithms, such as OLSR, while for high density of nodes XOR-based algorithms scale better in terms of delay when compared to source routing algorithms, such as DSR³.