Adaptive Multi-Path Routing Protocol in Autonomous Vehicular Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks consist of self-organizing nodes using multi-hop wireless links for communication without any infrastructure support. Traditionally, ad hoc routing protocols use the minimum hop count for their routing metric since a smaller number of transmissions is typically equivalent to a higher throughput, lower delay, and minimal power consumption. However, with the muti-rate capability of emerging radio interfaces, e.g., 802.11ax/be standards, the min-hop metric no longer results in high throughput. For instance, if the higher data rate links are selected for the route, it could result in a higher throughput even if the route takes more hop counts. In this paper, we propose a high throughput routing scheme, called MARV, which makes two key contributions. MARV searches for high throughput paths using an on-demand route searching algorithm so that the routing overhead is smaller compared to other multi-rate-aware routing schemes. MARV also searches for multiple paths to maintain both min-hop and high-throughput paths to select the adequate path depending on the data packet size. We conduct simulations to demonstrate that MARV outperforms not only min-hop path metrics but also previously proposed high-throughput metrics.