Efficient and viable intersection-based routing in VANETs on top of a virtualization layer

Recent vehicular ad hoc network routing protocols have relied on geographic forwarding and careful selection of road segments as ways to reduce the impact of individual vehicle movements. This paper shows how a virtualization layer and a new protocol running on top of it —called VNIBR, intersection-based routing on virtual nodes—can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art approaches, enabling an efficient and computationally feasible combination of topological and geographical routing. We prove by means of network simulations that this proposal consistently ensures moderate overhead, good packet delivery ratios, and low end-to-end delays, whereas the other protocols exhibit weaknesses due to flooding processes that scale poorly, proactive routing burdens or costly location services. We also present the results of graphics processing unit profiling used to assess the computational feasibility of the different schemes in the context of a real on-board computer, which reveals new advantages about scalability and impact of computational shortages on the routing performance.