DPCI-GPSR: A Directional Propagation Capacity Index for Enhanced GPSR Routing in VANETs
Date
Authors
Liu, Yue
Al-Hamid, Duaa Zuhair
Li, Xue Jun
Supervisor
Item type
Journal Article
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Publisher
MDPI AG
Abstract
Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) enable direct wireless communication between moving vehicles for safety and cooperative driving. Routing in VANETs is challenging due to high mobility, frequent topology changes, and variable node density. The Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) protocol maintains only a one-hop neighbor position table through periodic beacon exchanges, making it highly scalable. Each node forwards packets to the neighbor geographically closest to the destination. However, this distance-only criterion leads to a low packet delivery ratio (PDR). Existing improvements, such as Weight-Based Path-Aware GPSR (W-PAGPSR) combining distance progress, velocity direction, neighbor density, and link duration, incorporate multiple factors but complicate parameter tuning and lack a unified neighbor quality metric. This paper proposes Directional Propagation Capacity Index–GPSR (DPCI-GPSR), integrating neighbor information into a single directional metric capturing propagation capacity. Two enhancements are introduced: (1) an eight-direction DPCI computing a composite propagation capacity index per sector, exchanged via Hello packets, and (2) a trapezoidal link quality function treating 30–200 m as optimal while penalizing edge-zone neighbors. Implemented in NS-3 with SUMO-generated mobility, results across four node densities (30–120 vehicles), five concurrent sender–receiver pairs, and 15 random seeds show DPCI-GPSR achieves 63.08–98.39% PDR, outperforming both W-PAGPSR (52.38–80.14%) and standard GPSR (50.23–66.31%).Description
Keywords
40 Engineering, 4009 Electronics, Sensors and Digital Hardware, 0906 Electrical and Electronic Engineering, vehicular ad hoc networks, VANET routing, GPSR, greedy forwarding, link quality, PDR, NS-3 simulation
Source
Electronics, ISSN: 1450-5843 (Print); 2079-9292 (Online), MDPI AG, 15(10), 2172-2172. doi: 10.3390/electronics15102172
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© 2026 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.