Unicast geographic routing protocols for inter-vehicle communications: a survey

Abstract

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a new type of network that has promised countless applications including safety, comfort, infotainment, etc. The high mobility of vehicles in VANET makes routing protocol design a challenging task. Geographic routing is considered a suitable approach for VANET. The proposed geographic routing protocols for VANET, primarily, differ in the forwarding strategy. In this article we classify state-of-the-art unicast geographic routing protocols on the basis of forwarding strategies. We describe each protocol in terms of some qualitative metric. Finally the selected unicast geographic routing protocols are analyzed through a comparative discussion.