Evaluation of Routing Protocols in VANETS

Worldwide, 1.2 million people lose their lives and 50 million more are injured in road traffic accidents annually (WHO, 2004). Accordingly, the World Health Organization (WHO) in its 2004 World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention recognized road traffic injuries as "a major but neglected public health challenge". This led to the call for rigorous efforts worldwide to bring into reality effective and sustainable prevention. Safer vehicles, safety devices and safety applications on the road began to draw worldwide attention. The nationwide road safety applications deployment on roads suffers from deployment and costing issues. Ad- hoc networks were then introduced into this area to ease the deployment of traffic safety related applications. This variant of the ad-hoc network is known as the vehicular ad-hoc network, VANET. However, none of the existing research work has explicitly quantified and related performance of routing protocols with VANET parameters such as speed, density transport layer and transmission range. Here, several evaluation approaches and the consequent performance of several ad-hoc routing protocols are discussed.