Position-based routing in vehicular networks: A survey

Routing in vehicular network is a challenging task due to network partitioning, high vehicular speed, and city environment characteristics. These characteristics results in degraded performance in traditional routing protocols. Traditional routing protocols, addressing the issues of mobile ad hoc network, are applicable for MANET applications. Position-based routing protocols, which are mostly based on greedy routing, are more suited to highly dynamic and mobile network. In this paper, we survey state of art routing protocols previously used in vehicular networks, present open research challenges and possible future direction. We categorize protocols into two categories based on their communicating mode (vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure) irrespective of their simulating environment (highway, urban). Both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication provides connectivity based on multi-hop paradigm in a seamless way. We discuss pros and cons for routing protocols belonging to each category. By doing qualitative comparison of routing protocols, it is observed that hybrid communication would be the better choice for both communication mode operable in either a city environment or an open environment. & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.