Developing routing protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc
Networks (VANETs) is a significant challenge in these large, selforganized
and distributed networks. We address this challenge
by studying VANETs from a network science perspective to
develop solutions that act locally but influence the network
performance globally. More specifically, we look at snapshots
from highway and urban VANETs of different sizes and vehicle
densities, and study parameters such as the node degree
distribution, the clustering coefficient and the average shortest
path length, in order to better understand the networks'
structure and compare it to structures commonly found in large
real world networks such as small-world and scale-free networks.
We then show how to use this information to improve existing
VANET protocols. As an illustrative example, it is shown that, by
adding new mechanisms that make use of this information, the
overhead of the urban vehicular broadcasting (UV-CAST)
protocol can be reduced substantially with no significant
performance degradation.