Investigating the Suitability of Different Routing Strategies In Specific VANET Application Class

Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET), is an emerging technology that holds the opportunity to create potential applications that directly impact peoples' lives, traffic management, and infotainment services. Understanding VANET applications and the available routing protocols can help to infer the most suitable protocols that satisfy VANET application requirements. This paper develops a systematic classification methodology to classify VANET applications from a routing perspective, each application class has different network requirements which are laid down by VANET Projects conducted in different countries. Some of these requirements are related to the routing aspects and need to be satisfied by the selected routing strategies (proactive and reactive). The paper identifies routing strategies performance metrics related to each application class requirement, to efficiently guide the development of these routing strategies towards guaranteeing satisfactory performance for the applications under a wide variety of realistic VANET scenarios. It is also worth mentioning that minimum delay is a requirement needed by time and event-driven application classes. However, high reliability is a requirement needed by on-demand applications. The paper aims to provide a comparative study on the performance of routing strategies in different VANET application classes, to identify which routing strategies have better performance in specific VANET applications class. End-to-end delay is employed as a performance metric to evaluate the short delay requirement, while, the Routing Overhead (RO) is used to assess the reliability requirement. Simulation results showed that proactive routing protocol has a lower delay, which means that it is suitable for delay-sensitive applications such as time-driven and event-driven applications. The result also showed that the reactive routing protocol outperforms the proactive routing protocol in terms of RO, which means that reactive routing protocols can be nominated as proper routing strategies to satisfy the reliability requirement of the On-demand driven applications.