An Ant Colony Hybrid Routing Protocol for VANET

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a definite form of Mobile ad-hoc Network (MANET), which delivers data communication in Vehicular environment using wireless transmission. Its key goal is to increase the service quality of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), such as road safety, logistics, and environmental kindliness as well as information exchange. Nowadays transportation systems are facing serious issues in terms of performance and efficiency of VANET applications, nevertheless these depend typically on the method in which messages are conveyed between the nodes. Finding a better routing protocol for dynamic VANET systems is one of the main challenges. This paper presents an Ant Colony Hybrid Routing Protocol (ACOHRP) to improve the service quality of ITS, by increasing the efficiency and reliability of vehicle traffic information message transmission. ACOHRP delivers high efficiency through better beginning of packet delivery ratio to end-to-end delay. A comparative study on the proposed ACOHRP and existing Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol is conducted in a realistic scenario with VANET architecture, to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. Simulation based testing is performed using Matlab with ACOHRP performing better than DSR in a dynamic environment of VANETs.