Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) emerges to ameliorate road accident, traffic congestion, and infotainment. Cognitive radio (CR) is integrated with VANET (termed as CR-VANET) to deal with the spectrum scarcity problems. For better data transmission, routing is very important in a highly dynamic CR-VANET environment. Routing in CR-VANET has several challenges due to vehicles’ high-speed movements and channel accessibility issues. This paper proposes a 2-Hop routing algorithm based on the Multi-Objective Harris Hawks Optimization (2HMO-HHO) algorithm that chooses the optimal forwarders between the source and destination vehicles. Selecting 2-hops instead of multiple hops or the entire route increases the selected route’s stability and assures successful data transmission. The simulations performed in OMNeT++ with SUMO show that the proposed algorithm achieves promising results on throughput, delay, packet delivery ratio, packet loss rate and communication overhead.
