A load-balanced and mobility-aware routing protocol for vehicular ad-hoc networks

VANET (Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork) is comprised of devices that are installed inside vehicles and on road sides. Since vehicles can move randomly and at various velocities, the network topology is highly dynamic. Consequently, links between network nodes could be broken at anytime and communications from vehicle to vehicle could be corrupted. For this reason, a routing protocol independent of the network topology should be considered. Moreover, it should take into account throughput at intermediate nodes to avoid overloading. In this study, we introduce a new load-balanced routing protocol in which the well-known location-aware GPSR [1] (Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing) is redesigned to accommodate dynamics of vehicles. In the proposed protocol (called load-balanced GPSR), traffic traversing nodes are reported to the route calculation process that also requests for update of node position regularly. Specifically, the load-balanced protocol not only considers the movement of network nodes, but also analyzes packet queues of neighbor nodes while selecting the best route to forward data.