# Performance Evaluation of VANET Routing Protocols in Madinah City
## 1 Introduction  
Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications play a vital role in building an Intelligent transportation system in Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) [1, 2]. The vehicles and infrastructure communicate and exchange important information about the traffic situations, road conditions, and many more [3, 4]. This information helps autonomous vehicles to make decisions dynamically and avoid potentially dangerous conditions. Furthermore, utilizing V2V and V2I concepts in smart cities will enhance the safety of the vehicle on the roads as well as optimize the flow of traffic [5, 6, 7]. Figure 1 describes a VANET of a smart city environment with V2I and V2V wireless ad hoc communication. Vehicles transmit and relay packets across the network informing of incidents, such as accident scenarios, at specific locations. The ad hoc protocols employed by the literature and this work proactively or reactively send out packets to the nearest neighbors based on the communication range and antenna. The figure further elaborates on the V2I concept in the VANET environment, where a base station node with a largercommunication range receives the relayed packet and forwards it to vehicles further away or via cable to other entities in the network. The concurrent presence of human-driven and fully automated vehicles on a road network poses new research challenges. Especially in the case that this type of mixed fleet needs to cooperate under a real-life urban or extra-urban environment [8; 9]. The key challenge in these environments is traffic congestion, a regular phenomenon, which causes dynamic changes in the environment and in the decisions the automated vehicles will make (lane blockage, delays, illegal parking, short-time cars' stops) to be self-navigated within the urban area [10; 11]. To make things worse, the coexistence of heavy pedestrian traffic and adverse weather conditions, such as heavy rain, extreme heat, strong winds, and hail, can make the co-presence of conventional (human-driven) and automated vehicles even more challenging [12]. We need to find a way that will not lead to an increase in the traffic jam due to this necessary cooperation of the two different types of vehicle fleets. Traffic congestion induces serious infrastructure degradation in metropolitan areas. Considering that malfunction cooperation among conventional and automated vehicles can increase traffic jams and consequently the cost, it is clear that civil infrastructures should be equipped with novel sensors and software tools to enable cooperative functionality among the conventional and automated vehicles [13]. For the seamless coexistence of automated and conventional vehicles, it is clear that new signaling and traffic management methods are required. These methods should be dynamic and adapted according to the real-time traffic flow conditions, which will allow for increased efficiency. In this paper, we develop wireless communication between Vehicles and Infrastructure. Both human-driven and autonomous vehicles will need to wirelessly communicate with each other: Vehicle-to-Vehicle and with the surrounding road infrastructure (V2I). The transportation network utilizes traffic modeling and available data to simulate the future state. First, we use OpenStreetMap (OSM) [14; 15] to extract the roads network map of Madinah city. Next, we use the Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) [16; 17] traffic modeling tool to generate various traffic scenarios for our simulation. We select OMNeT++ [18; 19] as the network simulation platform in our study and import the Madinah city map as well as SUMO-generated traffic scenarios to perform simulations and obtain the results. For this study, we select three routing protocols, including Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) [20; 21], Destination Sequenced Distance Vector (DSDV) [22; 23], and Dynamic Manet on Demand (DYMO) [24; 25; 26; 27], which are discussed later.