Layer 3 Enhancements for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

This paper proposes two improvements to the Network Layer (Layer 3) that improves the performance in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks or VANETs. Specifically, it describes a new addressing scheme called Zone Based Geographic IPv6 Addressing, and a new routing algorithm called Contention Based Multi-protocol Hybrid VANET Routing. Our addressing scheme incorporates current locations into the IP address and our routing algorithm handles our location-dependent addresses, and also handles queries targeted to a geographic location and not a particular vehicle. We demonstrate using detailed VANET simulations that our proposed algorithms significantly outperform existing algorithms.