Assessment of VANET multi-hop routing over an experimental platform

Evaluation of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) over real environments is still a remaining issue for most researchers. There are some works which carry out performance tests to evaluate the communication channel according to physical and MAC conditions. Only a few works deal with multi-hop experimentation in this field, and practically none tests multihop protocols. In this paper an integral VANET testbed is evaluated, using 802.11b and a multi-hop network managed by the Optimized Link State Routing protocol (OLSR). Up to four vehicles are used to study the VANET performance over different traffic environments and different metrics are considered to analyse the results in terms of delay, bandwidth, packet loss and distance between nodes. Furthermore, a deeper analysis is carried out to track the routes followed by packets end to end. Since a routing protocol is used, results differ from traditional one-hop and static-route tests, presenting a more realistic study.