Abstract
Inter-Vehicle Communications (IVC) allows to exchange data among vehicles without requiring any fixed infrastructure in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). Multi-hop data delivery through VANETs is challenging because of rapid topology changes and network fragmentation. To address this issue, we combine the idea of store-carry and forward (SCF) with routing scheme. In this paper, we proposed a novel routing protocol for VANETs, which is well adapted to continuously changing topology in such networks. Adaptive Vehicle Traces Routing (AVTR) includes a mechanism for tracking source and destination vehicles when they leave their expected locations and use packet forwarding policy at the intersection. When the network is sparse, we use SCF paradigm and vehicles as ferries for overcoming the network partitioning. Finally, our protocol is compared with two VANET routing protocols, VADD and GPSR*. The obtained results show that AVTR outperforms GPSR* and VADD in terms of both packet delivery ratio and average end-to-end delay of data packets. For example, under specific conditions that was considered in the simulations, when the total number of nodes varies in networks, the packet delivery ratio of AVTR is approximately 8% better than VADD and 70% better than GPSR*. Also, using our algorithm delivery delay has been enhanced more than 82% and 58% in comparison to VADD and GPSR* respectively.