Network Protocols and Algorithms ISSN 1943-3581 2010, Vol. 2, No. 2 www.macrothink.org/npa 66 A Novel Delay- and Reliability- Aware Inter-Vehicle Routing Protocol Kayhan Zrar Ghafoor, Kamalrulnizam Abu Bakar, and Haidar N. AL-Hashimi Faculty of Computer Science & Information Systems Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 UTM Skudai, Johor D. T, Malaysia Tel: 006-012-7792943 E-mail:zgkayhan2@live.utm.my Kevin C. Lee Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA Received: June 27, 2010 Accepted: July 14, 2010 DOI: 10.5296/npa.v2i2.427 Abstract Intelligent transportation systems could improve transportation safety, driving assistance and traffic management system. Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is an emerging field of technology, embedding wireless communication networks into vehicles to achieve intelligent transportation systems. The development of such systems pose many unique challenges like designing routing protocols that not only forward packets with good end to end delay but also take into consideration the reliability and progress in data packets forwarding. In this article, we begin by presenting a review of recent unicast, geocast and broadcast routing protocols for message transmission. We then outline a novel Delay and Reliability aware Routing (DR 2 ) protocol that addresses these challenges (forwarding packets with low latency, high reliability and fast progress toward destination). Furthermore, our DR 2 protocol uses cross layer communication between MAC (Medium Access Control) and network layer. That is, the MAC layer observes the Signal to Noise (SNR), delay and velocity vector difference metrics for all paths of neighboring nodes, network layer then could select the best preferable path based on fuzzy inference system. We also used H∞ technique to optimize the membership functions and then tune it with rapid changing topology of VANET. To achieve a fair comparison with other routing protocols, we have implemented the proposed DR 2 protocol in Network Simulator 2 (NS 2). The preliminary results show that the proposed DR 2 protocol is able to improve end- to-end delay in sparse traffic conditions and packet delivery ratio in error prone urban vehicular scenarios.