Impact of concurrent communications in geographical broadcasting protocols for vehicular ad hoc networks

Abstract

Bringing to the market intelligent vehicles is one of the current challenges faced by car manufacturers. These vehicles must be able to communicate in order to cooperate and be more effective. The issue of inter-vehicle communications is an active research topic. This paper proposes a reliable geographical broadcasting protocol which has a twofold goal: limiting the risk of interference and reducing the dissemination time. To achieve theses goals, two mechanisms are proposed. The first one divides the road (more precisely, each vehicle's coverage area) into several segments depending on the local density. Thereafter, the priority to relay a message is given to nodes that are in the farthest segment from the source node. The second mechanism allows to reduce the waiting time thanks to a periodic update process. This paper also analysis the performance of geographical broadcasting protocols in case of multiple simultaneous communications. The goal is to observe how these protocols behave when the radio channel becomes overloaded. The comparison study (in terms of packet loss and dissemination time) shows that the proposed protocol outperforms two other VANETs' broadcasting protocols.