OBPF: Opportunistic beaconless packet forwarding strategy for vehicular ad hoc networks

In a vehicular ad hoc network, the communication links are unsteady due to the rapidly changing topology, high mobility and traffic density in the urban environment. Most of the existing geographical routing protocols rely on the continuous transmission of beacon messages to update the neighbors’ presence, leading to network congestion. Source-based approaches have been proven to be inefficient in the inherently unstable network. To this end, we propose an opportunistic beaconless packet forwarding approach based on a modified handshake mechanism for the urban vehicular environment. The protocol acts differently between intersections and at the intersection to find the next forwarder node toward the destination. The modified handshake mechanism contains link quality, forward progress and directional greedy metrics to determine the best relay node in the network. After designing the protocol, we compared its performance with existing routing protocols. The simulation results show the superior performance of the proposed protocol in terms of packet delay and data delivery ratio in realistic wireless channel conditions.