  Developing routing protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is a
significant challenge in these large, self- organized 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.
