Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) enable the timely broadcast dissemination of event-driven messages to interested vehicles. Especially when dealing with broadcast communication, data dissemination protocols must achieve a high degree of scalability due to frequent deviations in the network density. In dense networks, suppression techniques are designed to prevent the so-called broadcast storm problem. In sparse networks, protocols incorporate store-carry-forward mechanisms to take advantage of the mobility of vehicles to store and relay messages until a new opportunity for dissemination emerges. Despite numerous efforts, most related works focus on either highway or urban scenarios, but not both. Highways are mostly addressed with a single directional dissemination. For urban scenarios, protocols mostly concentrate on either using infrastructure or developing methods for selecting vehicles to perform the store-carry-forward task. In both cases, dense networks are dealt with suppression techniques that are not optimal for multi-directional dissemination. To fill this gap, we present an infrastructure-less protocol that combines a generalized time slot scheme based on directional sectors and a store-carry-forward algorithm to support multi-directional data dissemination. By means of simulations, we show that our protocol scales properly in various network densities in both realistic highway and urban scenarios. Most importantly, it outperforms state-of-the-art protocols in terms of delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and number of transmissions. Compared to these solutions, our protocol presents up to seven times lower number of transmissions in dense highway scenarios.
To overcome such problems Schwartz et al. REF proposed a scalable dissemination protocol (AMD) for highway and urban scenarios.
A scalable data dissemination protocol for both highway and urban vehicular environments
EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking
Computer Science