Link residual lifetime-based next hop selection scheme for vehicular ad hoc networks

In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), geographic routing protocols rely on a greedy strategy for hop by hop packet forwarding by selecting vehicle closest to the destination as the next hop forwarding node. However, in a high-mobility network such as VANET, the greedy forwarding strategy may lead to packet transmission failure since it does not consider the reliability of the newly formed link when next hop forwarding nodes are chosen. In this paper, we propose a scheme for next hop selection in VANETs that takes into account the residual lifetime of the communication links. In the proposed approach, a source vehicle selects a forwarding vehicle from a given set of candidate vehicles by estimating the residual lifetime of the corresponding links and finding the link with maximum residual lifetime. Initially, we present Kalman filter based approach for estimating the link residual lifetime in VANETs. We then present the details of the proposed next hop selection method. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme exhibits better performance in terms of packet delivery ratio and average end-to-end delay as compared to other conventional method.