Multi-criteria Receiver Self-Election Scheme for Optimal Packet Forwarding in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

In most of the existing geographical forwarding methods of Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET), a node periodically sends “hello” messages to determine the positional information of its direct neighbors. Each node stores and maintains more or less accurate information of its direct neighbors in a table. However, due to high mobility vehicles and traffic congestion the stored neighbors information is quickly outdated, failure notification increases significantly, and leading sub-optimal path. Furthermore, the transmission of periodic “hello” messages and table maintenance consume resources, which is not suitable for sensitive VANET. In this paper, we propose a geographical forwarding mechanism based on Multi-criteria Receiver Self- Election (MRSE) scheme to find best next hop without sending the periodic “hello” messages and maintaining neighbors information in the table. The selection of best next hop is based on the multi-criteria waiting function. In this function, the four key parameters including link life time, optimal distance from sender to receiver, optimal transmission range, and received power are determined to enable the next candidate node to make packet forwarding decisions. The simulation results show that the MRSE scheme performs up to 22% better in terms of packet delivery ratio as compared to some existing schemes. In terms of average delay, MRSE scheme performs best, with as much as 81% decrease compared to some existing schemes.