Improving proactive routing in VANETs with the MOPR movement prediction framework

Wireless vehicular communications are attracting more and more interests for applied research in industries. Most of the efforts are spent in deploying Vehicular Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) for applications such as active safety and Internet services. This paper addresses routing problem in VANETs for applications related to comfort and infotainment for users where an unicast routing protocol optimized for fast topology changes is needed. In previous research work, we have proposed a new movement prediction-based routing concept for VANETs called MOPR which we have already applied to the reactive routing protocol AODV in order to improve its performances by exploiting vehicules movements patterns. In this work, we first propose a new design of this concept, then we apply it to the OLSR routing protocol by optimizing the procedure of selecting the MPR (Multipoint Relay) sets as well as that of determining the optimal path from each pair of vehicles. Basically, the connected MPR graph is composed of the most stable wireless links in the VANETs. We conduct several simulation scenarios to investigate the performance of the modified OLSR (OLSR-MOPR) by studying several metrics including the end-to-end average delay, the routing overhead, the packet delivery ratio, and the routing overhead ratio. The simulation results of the modified OLSR for various VANETs scenarios show great improvements comparing to the basic OLSR.