Hybrid Genetic Firefly Algorithm-Based Routing Protocol for VANETs

Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs) are used for efficient communication among the vehicles to vehicle (V2V) infrastructure. Currently, VANETs are facing node management, security, and routing problems in V2V communication. Intelligent transportation systems have raised the research opportunity in routing, security, and mobility management in VANETs. One of the major challenges in VANETs is the optimization of routing for desired traffic scenarios. Traditional protocols such as Adhoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV), Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR), and Destination Sequence Distance Vector (DSDV) are perfect for generic mobile nodes but do not fit for VANET due to the high and dynamic nature of vehicle movement. Similarly, swarm intelligence routing algorithms such as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) routing techniques are partially successful for addressing optimized routing for sparse, dense, and realistic traffic network scenarios in VANET. Also, the majority of metaheuristics techniques suffer from premature convergence, being stuck in local optima, and poor convergence speed problems. Therefore, a Hybrid Genetic Firefly Algorithm-based Routing Protocol (HGFA) is proposed for faster communication in VANET. Features of the Genetic Algorithm (GA) are integrated with the Firefly algorithm and applied in VANET routing for both sparse and dense network scenarios. Extensive comparative analysis reveals that the proposed HGFA algorithm outperforms Firefly and PSO techniques with 0.77% and 0.55% of significance in dense network scenarios and 0.74% and 0.42% in sparse network scenarios, respectively.