Performance Study of MANET Routing Protocols in VANET

VANET (Vehicular Ad Hoc Network) is an evolving technology that brings numerous advantages, benefits and features of wireless networks to vehicles. VANET allows vehicles to communicate among themselves or with roadside equipment. Such kind of communication can be utilized for different purposes such as safety, comfort, or even entertainment. In VANET, routing of data, remains a challenging area for researchers due to its dynamic topology and the fast speed at which vehicles move. VANET is a sub class of MANET (Mobile Ad Hoc Network) with some distinct features. The performance of communication in VANET depends on the performance of its underlying network routing protocols. In this work, we performed simulation study to compare the most popular MANET routing protocols (namely: AODV, DSDV and DSR) for VANET by considering a real world scenario of a highway system. We used the famous NCTUns 6.0 network simulator for our comparative study. Numerous key simulation parameters have being considered which include speed, number of nodes, data rate, propagation model, fading and payload. The selected routing protocols were then evaluated in terms of important performance metrics which include throughput, packet drop, packet collision and average end to end delay. Our obtained simulation results show that the performance of the routing protocols depends largely on the application throughput, average delay and QoS (fewer packet drops).