Abstract: Providing efficient packet delivery in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is particularly challenging due to the vehicle movement and lossy wireless channels. A data packet can be lost at a forwarding node even when a proper node is selected as the forwarding node. In this paper, we propose a loss-tolerant scheme for unicast routing protocols in VANETs. The proposed scheme employs multiple forwarding nodes to improve the packet reception ratio at the forwarding nodes. The scheme uses network coding to reduce the number of required transmissions, resulting in a significant improvement in end-to-end packet delivery ratio with low message overhead. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is evaluated by using both theoretical analysis and computer simulations.

Key words: vehicular ad hoc networks, routing protocol, network coding, cooperative forwarding scheme