A Broadcast based Routing Protocol for Inter-Cluster Data Dissemination in Vehicular Communication

Vehicular communication is one of the fast growing and promising technologies for a safe and comfortable driving environment. These technologies do not end up with economic and safety ramifications, but also extended with other informational and entertainment oriented services. Data are being propagated multi-hop between source and destination vehicles for many real-life applications. Clustering is one of the effective and scalable solutions for data dissemination in wireless ad hoc networks. Though many cluster-based methods have been proposed for multi-hop data delivery in vehicular ad hoc networks, most of them do not consider the real-time changes in the network topology or imposes large penalties in routing such as unstable clusters, broken links, updating route tables. In order to address these issues, we propose a broadcast based routing protocol for inter-cluster data dissemination in this study that works on real-time vehicle information. Unlike, most existing routing algorithms, it only uses hello messages to obtain routing information without many other control messages. In addition, it alleviates the storage of routing information in every node, which largely reduces the overheads in routing. We performed extensive simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed routing protocol. Results show that the proposed protocol outperforms other approaches in terms of average delay, average delivery ratio and average number of hops.