A Reliable Firefly-Based Routing Protocol for Efficient Communication in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), the transfer of data packets from source to destination involves the use of an efficient path search mechanism. This paper proposes such mechanism, designed in the form of firefly-swarm next hop selection algorithm with angular routing (referred to as efficient firefly routing protocol (EFR)), meant to discover a suitable route from source to destination for data packets transfer. In the proposed EFR protocol, the swarm intelligence of fireflies is deployed to find the destination node using social interaction among fireflies. In doing so, the attractiveness, brightness, position of other fireflies, neighbor’s angular position, and destination coordinates of each firefly are considered as parameters to compute its next flight toward an intermediate or destination node. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed EFR protocol, showing that it outperforms the dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol in terms of throughput, packet delivery ratio, percentage of lost packet, and end-to-end delay, both under static and high mobility scenarios.