Comparative Analysis of Position-Based Routing Protocols for VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have fetched great interest in both industry and research oriented fields owing to the highly mobile nature and randomly changing topology exhibited by these networks. These characteristics make them susceptible to frequent disconnections, contention and collision related problems. Designing a set of protocols which would cater to the characteristic features of VANETs is a very daunting task. This paper presents a detailed survey of a wide variety of Position-based routing (PBR) protocols. PBR protocols exploit the on-board global positioning receivers to acquire location information of vehicles. Moreover on-board maps are used to fetch the details regarding layout of the road thereby purging the need to set up and maintain routes between the vehicular nodes, making these protocols highly desirable for VANETs. Further a novel classification methodology of the protocols under study along with a comparative analysis depicting their similarity and dissimilarities has been presented.