A Self-Adaptive and Link-Aware Beaconless Forwarding Protocol for VANETs

With the development of networks, Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) which act as the emerging application enhance the potential power of networks on the traffic safety and the entertainment. However, the high mobility and the dynamic nature of VANETs lead to the unreliable link which causes unreachable transmission and degrades the performance of the routing protocol in terms of the quality of experience (QoE). To provide a reliable routing for the data transmission, a self-adaptive and link-aware beaconless forwarding (SLBF) protocol is proposed. Based on the receiver based forwarding (RBF) scheme, SLBF designs a self-adaptive forwarding zone which is used to make the candidate nodes accurate. Furthermore, it proposes a comprehensive algorithm to calculate the waiting time by taking the greedy strategy, link quality, and the traffic load into account. With the NS-2 simulator, the performance of SLBF is demonstrated. The results show that the SLBF makes a great improvement in the delivery ratio, the end-to-end delay, and the average hops.