Joint link state and forwarding quality: A novel geographic opportunistic routing in VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is suffering from the frequent link breakage and low packet delivery rate, which challenges routing protocols. To address this issue, we propose a Geographic Opportunistic Routing protocol based on Link state and Forwarding quality inside nodes (LF-GOR). We first put forward a hybrid approach of filtering and prioritizing to determine a candidate nodes set of the sending node in LF-GOR, which considers not only position information but also link state and node's forwarding quality comprehensively. Based on the candidate nodes set, we design a flexible opportunistic forwarding strategy to involve multiple neighbors of the sending node into the local forwarding. Consequently, LF-GOR improves the reliability of transmission, and reduces the end-to-end delay brought by the timer-based scheduling mode of many normal opportunistic routing protocols. Finally, a comparison between LF-GOR and existing protocols is presented in the simulation. Corresponding results show that LF-GOR has the higher packet delivery rate and throughput, and also the acceptable delay.