Performance Evaluation of Routing Mechanisms for VANETs in Urban Areas

Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) and especially Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) have recently gained large interest and their performance is heavily studied. A great challenge in VANETs, especially in an urban setting, is the routing scheme used and the subsequent performance obtained. This work presents an experimental performance evaluation of routing mechanisms in VANETs, using simulation, within
an urban Manhattan grid like environment. It also describes and evaluates an enhancement of the Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) protocol that takes into account the motion of the vehicles and the nature of the urban environment. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed enhancement to the GPSR protocol manages to significantly increase the delivery ratio without increasing the power consumption; nevertheless, in some cases the improvement on delivery ratio is achieved at the expense of slightly increased end-to-end delay.