Optimizing Connected Vehicle Routing Protocol for Smart Transportation Systems

The significant growth in integrating connected vehicles into intelligent transportation networks has underscored the importance of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication in optimizing route efficiency, reducing traffic congestion, and enhancing road safety. However, routing protocols such as AODV face substantial challenges in dynamic automotive environments characterized by high mobility and rapid topology changes, leading to issues like packet loss, delays, and network congestion. Reactive protocols like AODV often suffer from route discovery delays, while proactive protocols like DSDV, although reducing latency, increase bandwidth consumption, making them less effective in highly dynamic contexts. This study introduces the Learning Automata Ad Hoc On-Demand (LA-AODV) routing protocol, designed to improve relay node selection and V2V communication efficiency. The proposed method leverages real-time vehicle data to predict and select optimal relay nodes under dynamic traffic conditions, thereby enhancing packet delivery ratio, throughput, and reducing latency and routing overhead. The results demonstrate that LA-AODV significantly outperforms AODV and DSDV across various traffic scenarios, with an increase in packet delivery ratio up to 4% in high traffic conditions, throughput reaching 125 units, and a reduction in end-to-end delay within the range of 2E+10 to 6E+14. These improvements highlight LA-AODV's superior efficiency in handling packet loss and latency, making it a suitable protocol for data-intensive and safety-critical applications that demand reliable and efficient data transmission. This study contributes by developing the LA-AODV protocol, which significantly enhances V2V communication performance in dynamic traffic scenarios and provides a robust simulation model replicating real-world conditions, potentially reducing traffic accidents.