A Street-Centric Routing Protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks in the Urban Environment

Abstract

Maha Jamal Amin Kadadha , 'A Street-centric Routing Protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks in the Urban Environment', M.Sc. Thesis, M. Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, United Arab Emirates, July, 2017. With the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT), various elements are being connected to the Internet such as vehicles. These vehicles allow integration of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) with an IoT architecture to enable exchange of information and support decision making processes among vehicles. For urban VANET, the environment characteristics such as street topology and intersections limit connectivity of vehicles. Additionally, the distributed nature of the network which relies on nodes voluntarily sharing their bandwidth requires motivating nodes to act as relays/ MultiPoint Relays (MPRs) to overcome any selfishness which would arise in the network. In this thesis, we address the problem of routing in urban VANETs using the proactive Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol. First, we propose a street-centric QoS-OLSR protocol for urban VANET that considers link-centric and street-centric parameters in calculating Quality of Service (QoS) and classifying neighbors. This protocol improves the selection of MPRs which in turn improves the network performance. Second, a Stackelberg game is integrated to the street-centric QoS-OLSR protocol to consider a node's preference for being selected as an MPR. This is done through considering the capabilities of the node as well as the profit endured from accepting to act as an MPR. Similarly, a node considers the benefit of selecting an MPR and awards it an incentive which increases its reputation to motivate its cooperation. Simulations conducted using Network Simulator 3 (NS3) demonstrate that the street-centric protocol improves percentage of MPRs, stability, throughput, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), average hop count and end-to-end delay compared to OLSR in urban VANET. On the other hand, the Stackelberg game even further improves throughput, hop count and stability from the street-centric protocol while outperforming OLSR in all considered metrics.

Date of Award	Jul 2017
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Hassan Barada (Supervisor)