Performance Evaluation of Routing Protocols for Public Transportation Vehicular Networks

In the last few years the scientific community has shown a growing interest regarding infrastructures for Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) communication as a special application of the more generic Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs). Adoption of a public transportation network as a VANET backbone - thanks to the full area coverage and a pre-scheduled repetitive path - can be an interesting solution in many situations where sensor networks are too expensive or does not scale well. In this paper we will discuss performances of routing protocols when applied to public transportation VANETs. We argue that, in this specific case, especially if a many-to-one communication paradigm is in place, routing strategies commonly adopted in VANETs can be a less appealing solution when compared to simpler ones, like distance vector algorithms. Through extensive simulations we demonstrate that, in the considered network scenario, a simple distance vector-based routing algorithm performs well. As a result, more complex - and resource hungry - protocols are no longer strictly needed.