Ratna Gautami et al. Int. Journal of Engineering Research and Applications www.ijera.com ISSN: 2248-9622, Vol. 6, Issue 2, (Part - 6) February 2016, pp.24-28 www.ijera.com 24|Page Hybridization of Meta-heuristics for Optimizing Routing protocol in VANETs * Ratna Gautami, **R.R Sedamkar, ***Harshali Patil * M.E Student, Department of Computer Science, Thakur College of Engineering & Technology, Mumbai University , Kandivali(E) ,Mumbai, India **Dean(Academics) &Professor , Department of Computer Science, Thakur College of Engineering & Technology, Mumbai University , Kandivali(E) ,Mumbai, India *** Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Thakur College of Engineering & Technology, Mumbai University , Kandivali(E) ,Mumbai, India ABSTRACT The goal of VANET is to establish a vehicular communication system which is reliable and fast which caters to road safety and road safety. In VANET where network fragmentation is frequent with no central control, routing becomes a challenging task. Planning an optimal routing plan for tuning parameter configuration of routing protocol for setting up VANET is very crucial. This is done by defining an optimization problem where hybridization of meta-heuristics is defined. The paper contributes the idea of combining meta-heuristic algorithm to enhance the performance of individual search method for optimization problem. Keywords – Hybridization, Meta-heuristic, Routing Protocol, VANET I. Introduction Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) is the emerging and important technologies which provide various services like Road traffic and Road Safety directly improving the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) services. VANET provide communication among vehicles i.e. vehicle –to- vehicle communication as well as between roadside infrastructure i.e. vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. VANET are self organizing network which is formed by collection of nodes that are moving vehicles which are geographically located which do the work of transmission, reception and routing to other nodes without any help of any centralized control. Several VANET routing protocols have been defined which caters to different application. These Protocols are broadly classified into topology based, Position based, Cluster based and broadcasting Protocols [1]. Topology based routing approach can be further categorized in to three groups: Proactive routing, Reactive routing and Hybrid routing. The scalabity of the network with a high number of nodes, frequent changing network topology, data delivery reliability, obstacles which leads to packet loss and network fragmentation are the challenges which impact the performance of the VANET as well as its routing protocol. Mainly all the VANET application depends on the routing protocol used. Therefore an optimal routing strategy that makes better use of resources is crucial to deploy efficient VANETs that work in frequently changing network topology. So finding well-suited parameter for configuring the existing protocols is the way of improving their performance drastically [1]. OLSR protocol is widely used to deploy VANET. It’s a unicast proactive protocol which has simple operation but the continuous exchange [6] of control packets leads to network congestion thereby decreasing the performance of VANET, indirectly depending on the selection of the parameters. OLSR uses hop-by-hop routing, i.e., each node uses its local information to route packets [2]. From C.Gomez et.al work one can understand that OLSR has good scope of improvement and can be optimally tuned by changing the configuration Parameters. To resolve this issue, offline optimization problem has to be defined. The optimization problem is to find minimum cost protocol with respect to QoS. This falls under the Combinatorial Optimization Problem where we have to find a optimal solution with minimum objective function i.e. communication cost. Number of possible combinations can be taken this makes it very complex job [1]. Therefore we make use of automatic intelligent tool, Meta-heuristic algorithms. In most of the optimization problem individual meta-heuristic algorithm is applied to fine tune the configuration parameter [1]. Jamal Toutouh et.al [1] used meta-heuristics algorithms and applied to OLSR protocol for finding the optimized parameter for configuration. Four different techniques: Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) , Differential Evolution (DE) ,Genetic Algorithm (GA) , and Simulated Annealing (SA) was RESEARCH ARTICLE OPEN ACCESS