Advancing Geographic Routing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Urban Networks

Geographic routing has become a popular routing protocol in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) because of its simplicity and low overhead. Recent research has recognized the applicability of geographic routing in vehicular mobile ad hoc networks (VANETs) without considering much the particular constraints in such an environment. Characteristics unique to VANETs are rapidly and dynamically changing network topology, road-constrained mobility, regular traffic pattern, sufficient power and storage, frequent disconnectivity, and high signal interference from other communicating vehicles and obstacles. To advance geographic routing and make it suitable in VANETs, the thesis proposal explores fundamental differences of and provides necessary improvements over conventional geographic routing in light of constraints of these environments. These improvements range from changing the paradigm of geographic routing in its recovery mode, eliminating routing inefficiency by junction-lookahead mechanism, exploiting opportunistic forwarding, removing routing loops from cross links, avoiding route backtracking and void by peer-to-peer density information, and taking care of intermittent disconnectivity by delay tolerant capability. Ultimately, the proposal aims at bridging the vehicular and airborne networks to handle complete ground disconnectivity using planned airborne networks trajectories and satellite links.