improving performance of opportunistic routing protocol using fuzzy logic for vehicular ad-hoc networks in highways

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (vanets) is an emerging technology with an extensive capability in various applications including the vehicles safety, traffic management, and intelligent transportation systems. considering the high mobility of vehicles and their inhomogeneous distributions, designing an efficient routing protocol seems necessary. given the fact that a road is crowded at some sections and is not crowded at the others, the routing protocol should be able to dynamically make decisions. on the other hand, the vanet environment is vulnerable at the time of data transmission. broadcast routing, similar to opportunistic routing, could offer a better efficiency compared to the other protocols. in this paper, the fuzzy logic opportunistic routing (flor) protocol is presented, in which the packet rebroadcasting decision-making process is carried out through the fuzzy logic system along with the three input parameters of packet advancement, local density, and number of duplicated delivered packets. the rebroadcasting procedures use the values for these parameters as inputs to the fuzzy logic system to resolve the issue of multi-casting, considering the crowded and sparse zones. the ns-2 simulator is used to evaluate the performance of the proposed flor protocol in terms of the packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and network throughput compared with the existing protocols such as flooding, p-persistence, and fuzzbr. the performance comparison also emphasizes on an effective utilization of the resources. simulations on highway environment show that the proposed protocol has a better qos efficiency compared with the above published methods in the literature.