September 2011, 18(Suppl.

1): 112117
www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/10058885 http://jcupt.xsw.bupt.cn
The Journal of China
Universities of Posts and
Telecommunications
AGP: an anchor-geography based routing protocol with mobility
prediction for VANET in city scenarios
SHI Yan
1
(), JIN Xiao-ye
1
, CHEN Shan-zhi
2

1. State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China
2. State key Lab of Wireless Mobile Communications, China Academy of Telecommunication Technology, Beijing 100083, China
Abstract
Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) routing is a key technology for efficient data forwarding in intelligent transport system
(ITS). A novel routing scheme, Anchor-Geography based routing protocol (AGP), designed specifically for VANET
communication in city environment is proposed in this paper. The reactive broadcasting is used for both getting destination
location and routing discovery. Connectivity status and load balancing is considered in routing decision. In addition, the map
information and the kinematics parameters are used for the vehicle trajectory prediction. Such a mobility prediction can provide a
solution for the situation in which the destination moves away from the location in the routing discovery procedure. In simulation,
VanetMobiSim is used as the traffic generator for more realistic traffic scenarios in VANETs than simple mobility model
definition. Simulation results in NS2 show that AGP protocol gains obvious improvement in packet delivery ratio and average
hops.
Keywords VANET, routing, anchor-point, mobility prediction

1 Introduction


VANET is a hot research area in the field of ITS and
vehicular telemetric. Routing is one of the key technologies in
VANET and responsible for efficient data forwarding in ITS
applications, especially for traffic information delivery in
V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle) communications [13]. Although
VANET can be considered as a special type of MANET, the
classical MANET routing protocols cannot be applied into
VANET directly for serious performance degradation [4].
This is because VANET has some notable features. In VANET,
the distribution of the vehicle positions and the flow of data
packets are constrained by the road topology. In addition, the
high mobility of the vehicles leads to frequent network
topology changes [45].
Some routing protocols specific for VANET have been
proposed. According to the technical features used in route
computing, they can be classified into several types:

Received date: 23-06-2011
Corresponding author: SHI Yan, E-mail: shiyan@bupt.edu.cn
DOI: 10.1016/S1005-8885(10)60200-2
topology-based routing, position-based routing, hierarchical
routing and knowledge-based routing etc [7]. Position-Based
Routing (PBR) is a promising solution for VANET because:
1) It follows the stateless routing principle which can avoid
network topology maintenance. This is a good feature for
VANET with highly dynamic topology.
2) The data flow is forwarded to the nearest node in
geography to the destination in each hop. But PBR depends
on some kinds of location service to get the destination
location. In addition, PBR focuses on geographically existing
paths but do not take into account if a path between source
and destination is populated [6].
As the distribution of the vehicle positions and the data
flow are constrained by the road topology, the intersections
become the key points where the vehicles change their
mobility pattern or data flows change the direction. Therefore,
in some research, the intersections are defined as anchor
points in some researches and an anchor list is selected as data
forwarding path [810].
Based on the above observation, a novel anchor point based

Supplement 1 SHI Yan, et al. / AGP: an anchor-geography based routing protocol with 113
routing scheme called AGP is proposed in this paper for
VANET in city environment. The intersection is abstracted as
an anchor point. Instead of depending on the location service,
reactive broadcasting is used for getting destination location
and routing discovery. Connectivity status and load balancing
is considered in routing decision. In addition, the map
information and the kinematics parameters are used for the
vehicle trajectory prediction. Such a mobility prediction can
provide a solution for the situation in which the destination
moves away from the location in the routing discovery
procedure. Simulation results show that AGP gains obvious
improvement in packet delivery ratio and average hops.
2 The proposed AGP
In AGP, two important data structures are maintained for
effective routing. They are Neighbor Table and Anchor-point
Table as introduced in Sect. 2.12.2. The main operations in
AGP, including routing discovery, routing decision, data
forwarding and recovery strategy for destination`s movement,
are introduced in Sect. 2.32.6.
2.1 Neighbor Table and periodic HELLO message
Each vehicle node maintains a Neighbor Table as shown in
Table 1. NT records its neighbors information including
address, location (represented by Cartesian coordinate),
velocity (described by the velocity vector) and timestamp.
HELLO message is periodically broadcasted by each node,
containing its location and velocity. NT is updated
accordingly when a vehicle receives HELLO from its
neighbors. If the source of HELLO does not exist in NT, a
new entry will be created for it. Otherwise, the neighbor
information is updated.
Table 1 Neighbor table
Address Location Velocity Timestamp
Addr
a
(x
a
, y
a
) (v
xa
, v
ya
) t
a
Addr
b
(x
b
, y
b
) (v
xb
, v
yb
) t
b


The sending interval of HELLO can be adjusted according
to the number of neighbors. The higher the density of the
vehicles, the lower accuracy of the neighbor`s information is
needed. That is, the period will be increased if a vehicle has a
large number of neighbors, else the period will be decreased.
This strategy can effectively reduce the signaling overhead,
especially in the densely populated areas.
2.2 Anchor-point Table
Assuming that the map information is known, a global
view about the intersections about their locations and adjacent
relationship can be acquired accordingly. The intersection is
abstracted as an anchor-point. Anchor-point Table (AT) is
used to represent the above information. Table 2 shows the
example AT for a map shown in Fig. 1.
Table 2 Anchor-point Table example
Anchor ID Location Number of link Adjacent anchors
I
1
(x
1
,y
1
) 4 I
2
,I
4
,
I
2
(x
2
,y
2
) 3 I
1
,I
5
,I
3

I
3
(x
3
,y
3
) 3 I
2
,I
6
,
I
4
(x
4
,y
4
) 3 I
1
,I
7
,I
5

I
5
(x
5
,y
5
) 4 I
2
,I
4
,I
6
,I
8

I
6
(x
6
,y
6
) 4 I
3
,I
5

I
7
(x
7
,y
7
) 2 I
4
,I
8

I
8
(x
8
,y
8
) 4 I
5
,I
7


Fig. 1 Map example
2.3 Routing discovery
Routing discovery is designed based on the reactive
broadcasting. When the source vehicle S wishes to
communicate with destination vehicle D, S will initiate the
routing discovery procedure. It assembles a REQ message and
fills in the packet with Ss address, location, velocity and Ds
address. To avoid routing loop, an R-ID (Request-ID) field is
also inserted into the packet. The REQ message with the same
R-ID value will not be forwarded if one node receives it a
second time in a short duration. Then, S broadcasts the REQ
message to its neighbors.
When a vehicle receives a REQ message, it will handle the
packet as shown in Fig. 2. Firstly, it will check the packet for
exceptional status handling. If this vehicle is the source node
or it has received this REQ message recently, it will drop the

114 The Journal of China Universities of Posts and Telecommunications 2011
packet. Otherwise, the R-ID value will be cached in this
vehicle for such judgment of the following REQ messages.
Then, if this vehicle is just the destination node, it will
execute the routing decision procedure as in section 2.4. If
this vehicle is an intermediate node, it will look up AT to
decide whether it is near an anchor-point. If yes, it will record
the anchor-point ID in the REQ message. Afterwards, it
updates some fields in the REQ packet. Hop number will be
increased as in other typical routing protocols. For estimating
the path connectivity in the routing decision procedure, the
average number of neighbors, the minimum number of
neighbors and the average packet queue length will be
updated at each intermediate node. Then, this vehicle will
forward the updated REQ message, that is, it rebroadcast this
REQ to all its own neighbors. In the end, when the broadcast
finally reaches the destination, the destination node has the
whole path to the source node recorded as a set of
intermediate anchor-points.
Procedure: REQ message handling
Action:
1: // exceptional REQ message handling
2: if be the source of this REQ message or I received this REQ message recently
3: then drop this REQ message
4: else cache the RF value for comparison of the following messages
5: end if
6: if be the destination of this REQ message // handling at destination vehicle
7: then goto Routing Decision procedure
8: else if be in the range of an anchor-point // handling at vehicle near anchor-point
9: record the anchor-point ID
10: end if
11: // updating the related fields in REQ message
12: update four fields in REQ message: Hop number, Average neighbors, Minimum number of neighbors, Packet queue
status
13: rebroadcast the REQ packet
Fig. 2 REQ message handling procedure
2.4 Routing decision
There may be more than one path exist between S and D.
When D receives the first REQ packet, it will start a timer, T
wr
,
to wait for a moment in order to get all the available paths.
And the paths between S and D are recorded a set of adjacent
anchor-points. Routing decision is the procedure choosing one
path from all the available paths for data delivery.
Based on the aforementioned parameters recorded in the
REQ message, a weight
i
w can be assigned to path i as:
avr min

i i
i
i
w
TL
o
|
= (1)
where
i
avr is the average number of neighbors of path i.
i
min is the minimum number of neighbors. T is the
transmission delay.
n
L is the average length of packet queue.
o and | are adjustment coefficients for the different
factors in routing decision.
Finally, the path with highest weight will be selected for the
real data delivery. From Eq. (1), it can be seen that a path with
a large value of
i
avr and
i
min could get a high weight. On
the other hand, the larger the transmission delay and the
average length of packet queue a path have, the lower weight
the path owns. Indeed, in such an approach, a path with better
connectivity, better performance will be chosen. In addition,
load balancing is also considered.
Then, D sends a unicast REP message back to S. The REP
message contains the coordinates of D and S, together with
the sequence of the recorded anchor-points. The REP packet
is forwarded back to S along the selected path conversely. For
every anchor-point in the sequence, a neighbor nearest to the
next anchor-point along the path is chosen as the forwarding
node. This procedure continues until the REP message arrives
at its destination S. Then S starts data transmission.
2.5 Data forwarding
The forwarding strategy in data transmission is similar to
how REP message is forwarded from D back to S. For each
hop, a neighbor nearest to the next anchor-point in the
sequence is chosen as the next-hop forwarding node. If the
next anchor-point of the current forwarding node is the last
anchor-point and D is in its NT, it will deliver the data packet

Supplement 1 SHI Yan, et al. / AGP: an anchor-geography based routing protocol with 115
to D directly. In order to deal with the situation in which a
data packet passing through the last anchor-point but fails to
find the destination there, a predicted anchor-point based
recovery solution is applied. When the destination vehicle, D,
cannot be found around the last anchor-point in the sequence,
the data will be forwarded to the predicted anchor-point and
then to the destination. The detailed predicted anchor-point
based recovery solution will be introduced in Sect. 2.6.
2.6 Destination mobility prediction
As described above, in AGP, the destination position is
estimated as around the last anchor-point in the path. Due to
the high mobility of the vehicles, there may exist such a
situation in which a data packet passing through the last
anchor-point but fails to find the destination there [6]. As the
amendatory approach, the next anchor-point that the
destination may pass through with greatest possibility will be
predicted based on the mobility metrics of the destination
vehicle. And this predicted anchor-point will be added to the
existing anchor-point sequence. Fig. 3(a) illustrates an
example scenario. Assuming the last anchor point is I
2
and the
vehicle runs along the arrow direction shown in Fig. 3(a),
3
I
will be selected as the predicted anchor-point and included
into the path.
(a) Example scenario (b) Digraph of the example scenario
Fig. 3 Predicted anchor-point
As shown in Fig. 3(b), the system can be modeled as a
digraph ( ) G= V,E . V is the set of intersections (or anchors).
A directed edge
a b
e I ,I =< > in E represents a lane from
anchor
a
I to anchor
b
I . For such an edge, the angle
between it and the positive direction of X-axis, ( , )
a b
I I u , can
be derived as shown in Eq. (2). For the last anchor-point in
the forementioned anchor-point sequence, such an angle will
be calculated for all its adjacent anchor points.
2 2 2 2
2 2 2 2
cos ; sin 0
( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
( , )
2 cos ; sin 0
( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
Ia Ib Ia Ib
Ia Ib Ia Ib Ia Ib Ia Ib
a b
Ia Ib Ia Ib
Ia Ib Ia Ib Ia Ib Ia Ib
x x y y
a
x x y y x x y y
I I
x x y y
a
x x y y x x y y
u

+ +

<

+ +

(2)
Similarly, the angle between the travelling direction of the
destination vehicle and the positive direction of X-axis, , is
calculated based on its velocity vector.
2 2 2 2
2 2 2 2
cos ; sin 0
2 cos , sin 0
y
x
x y x y
y
x
x y x y
v
v
a
v v v v
v
v
a
v v v v

+ +

<

+ +

(3)
Then, the absolute difference of and each
last
( , )
a
I I u
(
a
I ethe adjacent anchor-point set of
last
I ) is denoted as:
last
( , )
a
I I o u = (4)
The adjacent anchor-point of
last
I , with the minimum
value of o is selected as the temp predicted anchor-point.
Afterward, we can judge whether the vehicle is between the
temp predicted anchor-point and the last anchor-point based
on the position of them, i.e., if the vehicle coordination
( , ) x y satisfy the conditions shown in Eq. (5), the temp
predicted anchor-point will be set as the predicted
anchor-point and added to the sequence. Otherwise, the last
anchor-point itself is set as the predicted anchor-point.
last last
last last
temp temp
temp temp
min( , ) max( , )
min( , ) max( , )
I I
I I
x x x x x
y y y y y
<

<

(5)

116 The Journal of China Universities of Posts and Telecommunications 2011
where ( , ) x y ,
last last
( , )
I I
x y and
temp temp
( , ) x y are the
coordinates of the destination vehicle, the last anchor-point
and the temp predicted anchor-point respectively.
3 Simulation and results
The performance of AGP is evaluated in the NS2 (Version
2.34)+VanetMobiSim (Version 1.1) environment. The
proposed AGP protocol is implemented in NS2.
VanetMobiSim is used as the microscopic realistic traffic
generator for generating the traffic and mobility model of
VANET in city environment. The snapshot of city map in
VanetMobiSim is shown in Fig. 4. It is an area with the size of
2000 m*1700 m.
Fig. 4 City map snapshot in simulation
The maximum communication rang of the vehicles is set as
250 m. The simulation duration is 600 s. 5 CBR traffic flows
with the sending rate of 2 packets per second, 32 Bytes per
packet and the duration of 60 s are included. The
wr
T is set
to be 2 s. Three metrics are chosen as the performance
indicators of the routing protocols: (1) packet delivery ratio,
(2) average end-to-end delay, (3) average hops. The
performance of AGP, AODV and GPSR is evaluated in the
simulation. The performance of GPSR is too poor, so it is not
included in the following discussion.
3.1 Packet delivery ratio
The packet delivery ratio is defined as the fraction of the
data packets originated by an application that each routing
protocol delivers. Fig. 5 shows the packet delivery ratio of
AGP and AODV for city scenario with different numbers of
vehicles. As the overall trend, the packet delivery ratio is
enhanced with the increase of the vehicles number. When the
trafc density is low, it is easier to incur the network partition
problem. Therefore, the communication peers may be hard to
reach each other in a low trafc density scenario. When the
trafc density is high, the overall connectivity of the network
topology is improved and the packet delivery ratio increases
thereby. It also can be seen that AGP performs better than
AODV in packet delivery ratio. As AGP takes the path
connectivity status into consideration and uses the recovery
predicted anchor-point based on mobility prediction
technology, it shows certain performance advantages than
AODV.

Fig. 5 Packet delivery ratio vs. Vehicle number
3.2 End-to-end delay

Fig. 6 Average end-to-end delay vs. Vehicle number
The difference between the time a data packet is originated
by an application and the time this packet is received at its
destination is measured as the end-to-end delay of it. Fig. 6
shows the average end-to-end delay of the data packets of
AGP and AODV. In overall, the end-to-end delay AGP is a
little more than AODV. The most reason is that after a
destination node receives the first REQ packet, it will wait a
predefined duration (it is set as 2 s in the simulation) to get
most of the available paths. Using such a cost of 2 s in delay

Supplement 1 SHI Yan, et al. / AGP: an anchor-geography based routing protocol with 117
to get in return a high packet delivery ratio is a worth choice
for the applications with a low real-time requirement. For
either AGP or AODV, the average end-to-end delay decreases
with the reduction of the vehicle number. This is because the
routing protocol need more time to find a path when the
trafc density is low.
3.3 Average hops
The average number of hops a data packet travels along the
routing path from the source to its destination is also
measured in the simulation. As shown in Fig. 7, the data
packets in AGP need less hops to get to the destination than
AODV. The reason is that AGP gets to know the location of
destination by reactive broadcasting and the routing path is
denoted as a list of anchor-points. Therefore, it uses greedy
forwarding strategy in which the vehicle nearest to the
destination in each hop is chosen as the next-hop forwarding
node.

Fig. 7 Average hops vs. Vehicle number
4 Conclusions
In this paper, AGP, an Anchor-Geography based routing
protocol with mobility prediction is proposed for VANET in
city scenarios. The reactive broadcasting is used for getting
destination location and routing discovery. Connectivity status
and load balancing is considered in routing decision. In
addition, the map information and the kinematics parameters
are used for the vehicle trajectory prediction. Such a mobility
prediction can provide a solution for the situation in which the
destination moves away from the location in the routing
discovery procedure. Simulation results in NS2 and
VanetMobiSim integrated environment show that AGP
protocol gains obvious improvement in packet delivery ratio
and average hops, but the average end-to-end delay is a little
more than AODV because of the waiting duration in routing
discovery phase. Further evaluations are necessary to extend
these discoveries.
Undoubtedly, the strategy dealing with the frequent
topology changes is a key issue in VANETs. In AGP, we only
use the mobility prediction technology to handle the
movement of the end anchor-point. For further works, we can
use it to predict the neighbors location for reducing the
routing overhead. Also, we can use some strategies to control
the broadcasting procedure for decreasing the overhead. In
addition, some error recovery mechanisms can be proposed to
reduce the delay and overhead incurred by re-routing.
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the Major National Science and
Technology Special Project (2010ZX03005-002-02,
2011ZX03005-004-02), the Fundamental Research Funds for the
Central Universities (2009RC0503).
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