HyDi: a hybrid data dissemination protocol for highway scenarios in vehicular ad hoc networks

In this paper we tackle the problem of data dissemination under both well-connected and intermittent connected vehicular ad hoc networks. For such a purpose, we propose HyDi, a data dissemination protocol suited for highway scenarios. HyDi can seamless operate under well-connected networks by applying broadcast suppression techniques in order to avoid contention at the link layer, and also at intermittent connected networks by applying store-carry-forward techniques, thus delivering messages even when there is no end-to-end path. By means of simulation using the recently defined IEEE 802.11p standard, we compare HyDi against the only two existing solutions in the literature --- DV-CAST and SRD --- and we show that HyDi has an overhead as good as DV-CAST, outperforms both protocols when considering the average delay under heavy traffic scenarios, decreases the average number of hops to deliver messages and can deliver data to almost all nodes in a given region of interest.