On Hybrid Re-Broadcasting Techniques in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad Hoc NETwork (VANET), a subclass of Mobile Ah Hoc NETwork (MANET) has been a tech-buzz for the last couple of decades. VANET, yet not deployed, promises the ease, comfort, and safety to both drivers and passengers once deployed. The by far most important factor in successful VANET application is the data dissemination scheme. Such data includes scheduled beacons that contain whereabouts information of vehicles. In this paper, we aim at regularly broadcasted beacons and devise an algorithm to disseminate the beacon information up to a maximum distance and alleviate the broadcast storm problem at the same time. According to the proposed scheme, a vehicle before re-broadcasting a beacon, takes into account the current vehicular density in its neighborhood. The re-broadcasters are chosen away from the source of the beacon and among the candidate re-broadcasters, if the density in the neighborhood is high, then the candidate rebroadcaster re-broadcasts the beacon with high probability and with low probability, otherwise. We also performed thorough simulations of our algorithms and the results are sound according to the expectations.