A QoS-Aware Utility-Based Forwarding Strategy for Opportunistic Routing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs)

Abstract

This study presents a QoS-aware enhancement of the Bitmap-Based Opportunistic Routing (BOR) protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). The enhanced protocol, eBOR, uses a utility based decision making to select the next hop node based on latency, jitter and available bandwidth. To support real-time adaptability, a feedback mechanism is added to update these QoS metrics during packet transmission. The model was implemented and simulated using Python and NetworkX, and compared with BOR, Fuzzy Trust Routing (FTR) and Service-Fair Queuing (SFQ). Four metrics were used to evaluate the performance: packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, jitter and bandwidth utilization. Results show that eBOR outperforms the benchmark protocols in all aspects: reliability, delay and resource utilization. These results show that integrating QoS driven utility logic in opportunistic routing can improve the performance in dynamic VANETs.

Keywords: Opportunistic Routing, VANETs, QoS-Aware Forwarding, Utility Function, eBOR, Dynamic Routing