Pro-AODV (Proactive AODV): Simple modifications to AODV for proactively minimizing congestion in VANETs

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) are key to realizing Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Although VANETs belong to the class of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET), and there are numerous routing protocols for MANETs, none of these protocols are applicable for VANETs. In particular, VANETs are highly dynamic due to high speed mobility of vehicles and traditional routing algorithms for MANETs cannot deal with such dynamicity of network nodes. Several comparative studies have suggested AODV (Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector), a well known MANET protocol that is adaptive to dynamic changes in network and makes efficient utilization of network resources, to be the best candidate for dealing with VANETs. However, verbatim adoption of AODV is not an efficient routing solution for VANETs. Recent works therefore proposed various modifications and/or additions to AODV to make it suitable for VANETs. It is particularly important to control congestion in VANETs by efficiently dealing with the AODV "Route Request" (RREQ) packets. In this paper, we propose Pro-AODV (Proactive AODV), a protocol that uses information from the AODV routing table to minimize congestion in VANETs, yet sustains other performance metrics at acceptable levels. The novelty and elegance in Pro-AODV comes from the fact that it does not require the execution of any additional logic, it is sufficient to know only the size of the routing table at each node.