A multi-hop cross layer decision based routing for VANETs

In recent years, vehicular ad-hoc networks have emerged as a key wireless technology offering countless new services and applications for the transport community. Along with many interesting and useful applications, there have been a number of design challenges to create an efficient and reliable routing scheme. A conventional design approach only optimizes routing schemes without considering the constraints from other network layers. This may result in an under-performing routing mechanism. In this paper we present the design of a multi-hop cross-layer routing scheme that utilises beaconing information at the physical layer as well as queue buffer information at medium access control layer to optimise routing objectives. In particular, the proposed scheme integrates channel quality information and queuing information from other layers to transmit data. Using simulations as well as analytical studies we have presented results of our proposed scheme and have done a thorough comparison with existing approaches in this area. The results highlight better performance of the proposed cross-layer structure as compared to other conventional single layer approaches.