Routing and the Impact of Group Mobility Model in VANETs

Group vehicular applications could play a vital role in our life, whether these applications are safety-oriented or convenience-oriented applications. The group concept has also been used in support of many solutions in VANETs. Reference Point Group Mobility model (RPGM) is a popular group mobility model and has been used heavily in the literature. In order to study the impact of this mobility model on routing in VANETs, two well-known protocols are considered, namely AODV and AOMDV, as representatives of single-path and multipath routing, respectively. These protocols have shown performance merits over other routing protocols and they have a vital role in other wireless networks including MANETs and Wireless Mesh Networks. This paper provides a thorough evaluation of these protocols, by examining them under various potential realistic scenarios, under the RPGM mobility model. To the best of knowledge, this is the first study that examines the behaviour of the two protocols under the RPGM mobility model. The results from extensive simulations have shown that both protocols have comparable performance merits when the number of communicating nodes is low. However, increasing the number of communicating nodes has demonstrated a performance advantage for AOMDV, in the majority of the performance metrics used in the paper.