A Cluster-Based Delay Tolerant Routing Algorithm for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

This paper proposes a Cluster-based On-demand DElay tolerant routing (CODE) algorithm for VANETs. The CODE algorithm considers a higyway scenario and performs route discovery for data dissemination based on a cluster-based routing structure. To build the routing structure, CODE first configures vehicles moving on the highway into clusters and uses the relative speeds of vehicles in cluster-head election. A vehicle moving at a speed closer to the average speed of all vehicles has a higher probability to be elected as cluster head. The purpose is to maintain the stability of a cluster in order to achieve a good data delivery performance. Based on this routing structure, an on-demand delay tolerant route discovery mechanism is employed to find an available route for disseminating data packets from a source node to a destination node. Simulation results show that the proposed CODE algorithm has a better cluster stability, and can achieve a better performance in terms of end-to-end delay, packet loss ratio, and routing overhead as compared with existing LID and HD algorithms.