A-STAR: A Mobile Ad Hoc Routing Strategy for Metropolis Vehicular Communications

One of the major issues that affect the performance of Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANET) is routing. Recently, position-based routing for MANET is found to be a very promising routing strategy for inter-vehicular communication systems (IVCS). However, position-based routing for IVCS in a built-up city environment faces greater challenges because of potentially more uneven distribution of vehicular nodes, constrained mobility, and difficult signal reception due to radio obstacles such as highrise buildings. This paper proposes a new position-based routing scheme called Anchorbased Street and Traffic Aware Routing (A-STAR), designed specifically for IVCS in a city environment. Unique to A-STAR is the usage of information on city bus routes to identify an anchor path with high connectivity for packet delivery. Along with a new recovery strategy for packets routed to a local maximum, the proposed protocol shows significant performance improvement in a comparative simulation study with other similar routing approaches.