Minimum delay routing protocol for DTN-enabled VANETs

In vehicular ad hoc networks, the end-to-end path between the source and destination vehicle is not guaranteed due to frequent network partitioning caused by fast moving vehicles. For such sparse networks, Delay Tolerant Networks are proposed where a packet is carried by an intermediate vehicle until it meets with another vehicle or destination. This approach introduces variable amounts of delays in the networks. Therefore, an intelligent decision is required to select the next intermediate vehicle that can deliver a packet to the destination as soon as possible without any further delays. In this paper, we introduce a minimum delay routing protocol that utilizes the neighbor vehicles' velocity and distance from destination information to calculate the delivery delay for intermediate vehicles. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with FFRDV. Using an ns-2 simulation, we have verified that our scheme shows better performance and reduces end-to-end delay and average inter-meeting time by 70% as compared to FFRDV.