Abstract
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is an emerging technology that can be applied in intelligent transportation systems. Routing protocols are essential for obtaining reliable VANET networks. This article proposes a novel framework, designated as Reliability Aware Multi-Objective Optimization Based VANETs Routing (RAMO). The framework includes three levels: the first is the simulation of the VANET system; the second is the routing criteria, based on reliability and geometrics; the third level is the routing algorithm. The actual network is the next stage. Furthermore, the framework includes an optimization block that controls the parameters of each of the reliability, geometrical and routing blocks. The optimization is presented under the multi-objective perspective and based on the development of a novel variant of multi-objective harmony searching. This has been designated as Enhanced Gaussian Mutation Harmony Searching (EGMHS), which includes Gaussian mutation, objective decomposition and a harmony memory extraction algorithm. The evaluation was performed based on two levels. The first was the EGMHS evaluation using nine benchmarking mathematical functions, while the second was the RAMO evaluation based on the network simulator. The metrics obtained, including set coverage, delta metric, hyper-volume, packet delivery ratio (PDR) and end-to-end (E2E) delay, demonstrate the superiority over the baseline approaches of both EGMHS and RAMO with EGMHS.