VSHDRP: Vehicle Second Heading Direction Routing Protocol in VANET

Routing protocols in VANET are considered as one of the critical dilemmas that need to be tackled, especially in sparse environment. Thus designing an efficient routing mech- anism has an impact on enhancing the network performance in terms of disseminating messages to their desired destinations. This paper proposes a novel routing protocol in VANET for sparse environment called Vehicle Second Heading Direction Routing Protocol (VSHDRP), which is designed to leverage the probability of delivering a data packet to its destination and to increase connectivity and route stability by utilising the knowledge of the Second Heading Direction (SHD) in the process of selecting the next hop-node. To the best of our knowledge this is the first paper that takes the SHD into account to improve the routing mechanism in VANET. Moreover, the VSHDRP protocol is formalised in the Calculus of Context-aware Ambients (CCA) and simulated using the CCA interpreter in order to analyse the behaviour of the protocol.