TDMA-aware routing protocol for multi-hop communications in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) have become an emerging technology due to the variety of their applications in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). By creating a vehicular network, each vehicle can exchange information to inform drivers in other vehicles about the current status of the traffic flow or a dangerous situation. Multi-hop communications is an effective method that can be used for information exchange over distances greater than the transmission range of the transmitting vehicle. However, it is a great challenge to ensure a stable multi-hop communication link with a low delivery delay due to the high mobility of the vehicles involved. The goal of this paper is to design a TDMA aware Routing Protocol for Multi-hop wireless vehicular ad hoc networks (TRPM) in order to provide the ability to transmit/receive packets over long distances. The proposed routing scheme is based on a medium access control protocol, in which the intermediate vehicles are selected based on the TDMA scheduling. The simulation results reveal that our routing protocol significantly outperforms other protocols in terms of average end-to-end delay, average number of relay vehicles and the average delivery ratio.