TIBCRPH: Traffic Infrastructure Based Cluster

Routing Protocol with Handoff in VANET

Tiecheng Wang

Gang Wang

School of Electronics and Information Engineering

Beihang University
Beijing, China
tiecheng_wang@163.com

School of Electronics and Information Engineering

Beihang University
Beijing, China
gwang@buaa.edu.cn

AbstractVehicular Ad Hoc network (VANET), is a hot topic

that applying mobile Ad Hoc network (MANET) to ITS in recent
years. Special environments and applications cause difficulties to
the design of the routing protocols of VANET which can not use
the exiting protocols well. Firstly, this paper introduces some
concepts of VANET briefly, analyzes and compares some
different kinds of existing routing protocols in VANET. Then,
basing on the characteristics of the VANET, and utilizing the
idea of cluster and handoff, a more efficient protocol is developed
in this paper, which is dubbed Traffic Infrastructure Based
Cluster Routing Protocol with Handoff (TIBCRPH). Finally,
TIBCRPH is compared with other six typical routing protocols
on node density and speed respectively by NS2. The results show
that TIBCRPH performs better than some traditional routing
protocols.
Keywords-vehicular Ad Hoc
infrastructure, cluster, handoff

I.

network,

routing

protocol,

INTRODUCTION

Vehicular Ad Hoc network (VANET) is a special type of

mobile Ad Hoc network (MANET), which is specially
designed for Vehicle-To-Vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-ToInfrastructure (V2I) communications. As a component of the
intelligent transportation system (ITS) and one of the concrete
applications of MANET, VANET has attracted more and more
research attention from both the academia and industry [1], [2].
Compared with general MANAT, VANET have some special
characteristics: (1) Vehicle nodes move fast, network topology
and states change rapidly, the lifetime of the route is short. (2)
The distributing of vehicle nodes is constrained by the roads,
the communications of vehicle nodes are affected by the
roadside obstacles. (3) The movements of vehicle are affected
by infrastructure and behavior of drivers. (4) There are
abundant assistant information backup, such as using GPS can
obtain the location information of the vehicle nodes. Routing
protocols, as one of the key technologies, are important to
VANET, how to design an effective routing protocol to
guarantee the information timely and reliable transmission is a
hot topic in the research area of VANET.
There have been many routing protocols in MANET, but
most of them are not specially designed for VANET, and many
of them do not work well. Recently, In order to make the
traditional MANET protocols adaptive for VANET,

researchers propose some improved protocols. For example,

some improved table-driven routing protocols, such as VHRP
[3]. Some improved on-demand routing protocols, such as
ROMSGP [4], PAODV [5]. Some improved geographic-based
routing protocols, such as GSR [6], CAR [7]. Researchers also
propose some routing protocols for VANET specially, such as
PBR (Prediction Based Routing) protocol [8], PGR (Passive
Geographical Routing) protocol [9] and VRP (Vehicle Routing
Protocol) [10]. These protocols above have considered
VANETs characteristics, but all of these designs are generally
based on the ideas of traditional protocols and they inherit the
shortcomings of traditional ones. So they cannot solve the
problems caused by the high speed of vehicles and ratio
obstacles well.
Nodes high mobility leads to frequent broken routes in
VANET, using the idea of cluster can help to achieve efficient
transmission of messages. In this paper we utilize the exiting
traffic infrastructures to cluster the network effectively, which
will assist the transmission of data packets. Due to the
characteristics of radio-communication, the overlap between
clusters will occur inevitably, in order to ensure the service
quality of nodes communications, we make use of the handoff
idea of cellular networks and propose a new protocol which is
special for VANET, the proposed scheme is dubbed Traffic
Infrastructure Based Cluster Routing Protocol with Handoff
(TIBCRPH).
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section II,
we introduce the process of TIBCRPH. We present our
simulation environment and compare TIBCRPH with other six
typical routing protocols in Section III. The conclusion is given
in section IV.
II.

PROTOCOL DESCRIPTION

A. Assumptions
First, we must make some assumptions about the nature of
the network. All of the nodes are deployed in a two-dimension
space. Each node is location aware through some types of
positioning service, such as GPS. Furthermore, there is a
location service mechanism which enables the source to detect
position and velocity of destination node. Links are bidirectional.

This work is supported by the Foundation for Innovative Research

Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant
No.60921001), the National Science Foundation for Distinguished Young
Scholars of China (Grant No.60625102), and the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (Grant No. 60972007).

978-1-4244-7596-4/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

B. Detailed description of TIBCRPH

In this section, we describe the TIBCRPH detailedly as
follows.
As shown in Fig. 1, we utilize the exiting traffic
infrastructures as cluster-head to divide the network into
multiple clusters. Each cluster has a cluster-head and a group of
members, the cluster-heads of each cluster form a backbone
network. Through this mode, we are able to cover all roads of
the region so as to transmit message seamlessly.

vehicle a), the other is turning onto a new street (like vehicle b).
The current cluster-head of vehicle a is E, a is now driving
inside cluster E (shortened form of the cluster which clusterhead is E) and is going to drive to cluster F (shortened form of
the cluster which cluster-head is F). Let (xE, yE) and (xF, yF)
denote the Cartesian coordinates of the cluster-head E and F,
by using GPS we can obtain the Cartesian coordinates of
vehicle a as (xa, ya), the speed value as va and the driving
direction vector as dxa and dy a , respectively. Thus we can
estimate whether a is a handoff vehicle through whether it is
driving into the range of cluster F. We can get the distance
between vehicle a and cluster-head F:

DaF

xa xF 2 ya yF 2

(2)

The direction vector from E to F:

EF xF xE , yF yE

(3)

The velocity vector of vehicle a:

Va v a dx a v a dy a

(4)

Then the dot product of EF and V a can be calculated as

follows:

d a Va EF

Figure 1. The cluster mode of TIBCRPH

Nevertheless, the cluster mode shown in Fig. 1 will lead to

overlaps (shadow region in the figure) between the clusters. By
calculating, we can see the overlaps are only about 28.5% of
the road region, so the interference region is not large. We need
a handoff metric when vehicles drive across the interference
regions. For clarity, we describe it below.
We analyze the necessity of handoff first, basing on Fig. 1,
setting the width of road as L, the speed of the vehicle as v and
the time which the vehicle need to cross the overlap as t, we
have:

0t

2 1 L v

(1)

From the relation above, we can see that t is related with

both L and v. In city Scenarios, the speeds of vehicles are not
high, for example, if L40m, when v5m/s, we can calculate
that t3.3s, and when v10m/s, then t1.65s. So, in this
paper, a handoff metric is important to improve the
communication quality. The idea of our handoff metric is
discussed below.
We calculate dot product of velocity vector of a vehicle and
its two neighboring cluster-heads direction vector, through the
value of the dot product, we can estimate the ID of one clusterhead which is more suitable for the vehicle. Subsequently, we
will select the node of this ID as the cluster-head of the vehicle,
then, the vehicle will send or receive messages only through
the selected cluster-head.
As shown in Fig. 1, there mainly are two cases in city
scenarios, the one is driving straight on the same road (like

(5)

If da > 0 and DaF R (R denote the radius of the cluster),

we can confirm that vehicle a is performing a handoff process
from cluster E to cluster F. Now we will select F as new
cluster-head of the vehicle a. Similarly, as to vehicle b, we can
also figure out DbH, GH , V b and db. If db > 0 and DbH R,
then vehicle b is performing a handoff process from cluster G
to cluster H. H will be selected as new cluster-head of the
vehicle b.
Inside a cluster, the members will communicate with each
other directly, and cluster-head can broadcast data packets to
the members or directly send packets to one node. Since the
cluster-heads are exiting traffic infrastructures, the
communication between them may choose either wired or
wireless mode. If using wireless mode, as the locations of
cluster-heads are usually fixed, we can generally make use of
table-driven algorithm.
Basing on the description above, we develop the flow chart
of TIBCRPH in Fig. 2.

Border mode: We identify that all vehicles will make a

u-turn and never leave the map.

Concretely in the simulation, we set the parameters of

TIBCDMM as follows. When the vehicles reach intersections,
we set the probability of continuing straight to 0.5, the
probabilities of both turning right and turning left to 0.25. The
time of red light and green light are set to 15s and 10s,
respectively.
B. Simulation parameters
In this paper, we use NS2 to simulate our protocol. We
choose a typical simulation map which is similar to the one in
[5], the simulation parameters are summarized in Table I.
TABLE I.

SIMULATION PARAMETERS

Parameter

Value

Simulation area

900m900m

Number of intersections

Distance between intersections

300m

Number of vehicles

30 70

Speed of vehicles

5 25m/s

Simulation time

200s

MAC protocol

IEEE802.11

Data rate

2 Mbps

Data packet size

512bytes

C. Simulation Results and analyses

To analyze our protocol comprehensively, we compare the
TIBCRPH with other six typical routing protocols:
Figure 2. The flow chart of TIBCRPH

III.

SIMULATION AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

A. Mobility model
Before the simulation, a suitable mobility model is
necessary.
Hoping to get vehicle movements which are suitable for
city scenario in this paper, we propose a new mobility model
which is based on Car-Drive Model [11], we dub this model
Traffic Infrastructure Based Car-Drive Mobility Model
(TIBCDMM) and describe it below.

Movement scenario: Contain roads, intersections,

traffic lights, road signs etc.
Movement mode: Vehicles move along the roads until
they reach intersections, We set the probability of
continuing straight to , and the probabilities of both
turning right and turning left are set to (1-)/2. In order
to simulate traffic lights influence to the movements
of vehicles, we set the time of red light and green light
to t1 and t2, respectively, which will enhance the reality
of vehicles movements.

Flooding routing protocol: MFlood.

Table-driven routing protocol: DSDV.

On-demand routing protocol: AODV.

Location-assist on-demand routing protocol: LAR.

Geographic-based routing protocols: DREAM, GPSR.

In this paper, in order to evaluate our protocols

adaptability to node density, not losing universality, we do
simulation in 5 groups, during which the node number was set
from 30 to 70. Similarly, to evaluate the protocols adaptability
to node speed, we do simulation in 9 groups, during which the
node number was changed from 5m/s to 25m/s. We do 100
times and calculate the average value for each group. The
simulation results are shown in Figs. 3 8.
Average delivery ratio: Fig. 3 shows that MFlood, AODV,
and TIBCRPH have high delivery ratio. When nodes in the
network are sparse (node number is 30), TIBCRPH
outperforms the other protocols, with as much as 7% increase
compared to MFlood and as much as 5% increase compared to
AODV. When node density is comparative high, the delivery
ratio of TIBCRPH is only a little lower than MFlood.
Moreover, our protocol performs well in the adaptability to
node density than other ones and its delivery ratio is steady at
about 86.6%. Fig. 4 shows the average delivery ratio of

TIBCRPH, which is also high enough and the adaptability to

the change of node speed is better than other protocols.
Besides, we can get several conclusions from Figs. 3 and 4.

The delivery ratio of DSDV is low at all time and

reduces sharply when the nodes speed up.
Higher node density does not necessarily mean
improved performances for protocols (such as GPSR)
which do not consider the road layouts. Two
observations can be made on GPSR. First, given that
city roads include irregularities such as dead-end
streets, following the shortest Euclidean distance is not
always equivalent to following the shortest path
through the roads. Second, the GPSR protocol is
stateless and if a local maxima forms in the network,
the stateless nature of the protocol means that packets
after packets will follow the same path to the position
of the local maxima, and once there, the forwarding
mode of each packet will be set to perimeter
forwarding.

and speed. We can see that DSDV, GPSR, DREAM, LAR and
our TIBCRPH perform well and the delay of them change
slightly with the increasing of nodes speed. As a proactive
protocol, DSDV have the shortest delay. The delay of
TIBCRPH is short enough and is steady at about 0.03s.
Besides, conclusions will be obtained from Figs. 5 and 6.

The average delay of MFlood is comparative higher

and become longer with the higher node density. This
mainly because that flooding need to cover all the
nodes in the network.

AODV performs badly in average end-to-end delay, its

delay is very high and influenced by node density and
speed acutely. This due to VANETs characteristics
including nodes high-speed, frequent topology change,
and short connection lifetime.

The delivery ratio of DREAM improves evidently with

the increasing of nodes speed, this may because that
higher speed increases the region of flooding.

Figure 5. Average end-to-end delay vs node number (node speed is 15m/s)

Figure 3. Average delivery ratio vs node number (node speed is 15m/s)

Figure 6. Average end-to-end delay vs node speed (node number is 50)

Figure 4. Average delivery ratio vs node speed (node number is 50)

Average end-to-end delay: Figs. 5 and 6 show the average

end-to-end delay of the protocols versus different node density

Average path length: Figs. 7 and 8 plot the average path

length of packets received at destination for the protocols. We
can see that the path lengths of AODV, DSDV, GPSR,
DREAM and TIBCRPH are all short (within 5 hops) and are
not influenced by the changement of either node density or
speed acutely. The hops of DSDV are the shortest because that
DSDV is a proactive protocol. TIBCRPH performs well and its
average hops are about 3.7.
Besides, we can obtain two conclusions from Figs. 7 and 8.

The path length of LAR is comparative long and

become longer as node density and speed increasing.
This reason is that LAR uses partial flooding when it
searches for routes.
Due to flooding all over the network, MFlood has the
largest path length all the time and its hops increase
with the changement of node density obviously.

Figure 7. Average hops vs node number (node speed is 15m/s)

Figure 8. Average hops vs node speed (node number is 50)

According to analyses of the simulation results above, we

will find that TIBCRPH always performs so well no matter
how node density and speed change that it can adapt to
VANET in city scenarios commendably.
IV.

CONCLUSION

Special environments and applications cause that VANET

can not use the exiting protocols well. In this paper we utilize
the exiting traffic infrastructures to cluster the network
effectively and make use of the handoff idea of cellular
networks to propose a new protocol dubbed TIBCRPH which
is special for VANET. Using NS2, TIBCRPH is compared
with other six typical routing protocols on node density and
speed respectively. The results show that TIBCRPH always
performs well no matter how node density and speed change
which is better than some traditional routing protocols.

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