A multiconstrained QoS-compliant routing scheme for highway-based vehicular networks

With the deployment of multimedia services over VANETs, there is a need to develop new techniques to insure various levels of quality of services (QoS) for real time applications. However, in such environments, it is not an easy task to determine adequate routes to transmit data with specific application QoS requirements. In this paper, we propose CBQoS-Vanet, a new QoS-based routing protocol tailored towards vehicular networks in a highway scenario. This protocol is based on the use of two techniques: First a clustering technique which organizes and optimizes the exchange of routing information and, second, a bee colony inspired algorithm, which calculates the best routes from a source to a destination based on given QoS criteria. In our approach, clusters are formed around cluster heads that are themselves elected based on QoS considerations. The QoS criteria here are based on the two categories of metrics: QoS metrics and mobility metrics. The QoS metrics consists of the available bandwidth, the end-to-end delay, and the jitter. The mobility metrics consists of link expiration time and average velocity difference. We have studied the performance of CBQoS-Vanet through simulation and compared it to existing approaches. The results that we obtained show that our technique outperforms, in many aspects, the approaches that it was compared against.