Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is a type of Mobile Ad hoc network 8 (MANET) that provides exchange of messages between vehicles. VANETs encourage 9 researchers to create safety and comfort applications that will lead to Intelligent 10 Transport Systems (ITS). The conventional ad hoc routing methods may cause flooding 11 of packets to find the routes in VANET. Hence, finding a route from source to 12 destination vehicles by local broadcast techniques in densely populated urban areas may 13

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... te a broadcast storm and network bandwidth is unnecessarily wasted to discover 14 routes between source and destination vehicles. In this paper, an Efficient Routing 15 Protocol (ERP) is proposed to utilize the network bandwidth efficiently by avoiding 16 unnecessary rebroadcast. This new protocol finds a Minimum Connected Dominating 17 Set of Vehicles (MCDSV) and treats them as a virtual backbone for communication in 18 VANETs. The vehicles in the virtual backbone act as forwarders are responsible for 19 local broadcasting in the network. The vehicles which are not in the MCSDV are not 20 allowed to broadcast the packets as forwarders and hence the bandwidth utilization is 21 minimized. The proposed protocol has been implemented in NS2 and its performance is 22 compared with other routing protocols for Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Control 23 Overhead Ratio (COR) and Average End-to-End delay. 24 2 1 Networks and Unicast Routing. 2 1. Introduction 3 VANET contains vehicles that may communicate Vehicles-to-Vehicles (V2V) through 4 wireless communications. Vehicles in VANET communicate by one hop 5 communication (source vehicles directly communicate with destination vehicle) or 6 multi-hop communication (source vehicles cannot directly communicate with 7 destination vehicle) [1]. VANETs play an important component for Intelligent 8 Transportation Systems (ITS) to manage the traffic efficiently. VANET applications are 9 considered as effective safety applications by researchers and automobile manufacturing 10 company. VANETs have distinct features like high mobility, dynamic network 11 topology, road restrictions and scalability that differentiate it from MANETs [2]. 12