Applicability of position-based routing for VANET in highways and urban environment

In the last years many routing protocols proposals have been made considering the particular VANET characteristics. From the many proposals that came up, the protocols based on the vehicles positions were found to be the most adequate to VANETs due to their resilience to handling the nodes position variation. In this study we will survey the existing position-based routing protocols. Unlike other studies we will emphasise on their applicability to different environments. We start by characterising the vehicular network environment, namely the urban and the highway environments. Afterwards, topology-based protocols are compared to position-based protocols and to the latter are identified the different used strategies and their performances are qualitatively evaluated relatively to different metrics. The different position-based routing proposals are described including a pseudo-code specification, and a comparison is made based on different perspectives. To conclude, the main constrains to urban and highway environments are characterised and the adaptability of each protocol to each of the environments is evaluated. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.