Abstract
A novel position-based routing protocol anchor-based connectivity-aware routing (ACAR) for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is proposed in this paper to ensure connectivity of routes with more successfully delivered packets. Both buses and cars are considered as vehicular nodes running in both clockwise and anticlockwise directions in a city scenario. Both directions are taken into account for faster communication. ACAR is a hybrid protocol, using both the greedy forwarding approach and the store-carry-and-forward approach to minimize the packet drop rate on the basis of certain assumptions. Our solution to situations that occur when the network is sparse and when any (source or intermediate) node has left its initial position makes this protocol different from those existing in the literature. We consider only vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication in which both the source and destination nodes are moving vehicles. Also, no road-side units are considered. Finally, we compare our protocol with A-STAR (a plausible connectivity-aware routing protocol for city environments), and simulation results in NS-2 show improvement in the number of packets delivered to the destination using fewer hops. Also, we show that ACAR has more successfully-delivered long-distance packets with reasonable packet delay than A-STAR.