Analysis of the Effect of Road Side Units (RSU) Existence on A-STAR Routing Protocol Performance in VANET Network

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a technology developed from the Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) that enables wireless communication between vehicles. In VANET, vehicles can exchange information between vehicles with nearby vehicles as Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication and also between vehicles with surrounding infrastructure as Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication. VANET technology aims to reduce the risk of accidents in driving and increase comfort while driving. A routing protocol in VANET determines the route according to its characteristics. It also affects the network performance. In this paper, an experiment was carried out using Network Simulator-2 (NS-2) software to analyze the effect of the existence of a Road Side Unit (RSU) on the performance of the ASTAR routing protocol in VANET. Anchor-based Street and Traffic Aware Routing (A-STAR) is a type of routing protocol in the Position Based Routing Protocol category. Simulations were done to determine whether the presence of RSU in an A-STAR routing protocol scenario has a major influence on the performance of packet delivery. Average throughput and average end-to-end delay were used as parameters to compare the results between two scenarios used. The results indicate that the addition of the RSU can improve the performance of the A-STAR routing protocol in the time of delivery by showing a decrease in average end-to-end delay. However, the packet delivery performance decreases with the decreasing of average throughput when RSUs are added which was caused by an increase in the number of nodes.