BL-CAST:Beacon-Less Broadcast Protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

With the extension of wireless technology, vehicular ad hoc networks provide important services for the dissemination of general data and emergency warnings. However, since, the vehicle topology frequently changes from a dense to a sparse network depending on the speed of the moving vehicles and the time of day, vehicular ad hoc networks require a protocol that can facilitate the efficient and reliable dissemination of emergency messages in a highly mobile environment under dense or intermittent vehicular connectivity. Therefore, this paper proposes a new vehicular broadcast protocol, called BL-CAST, that can operate effectively in both dense and sparse network scenarios. As a low overhead multi-hop broadcast protocol, BL-CAST does not rely on the periodic exchange of beacons for updating location information. Instead, the location information of a vehicle is included in a broadcast message to identify the last rebroadcasting vehicle in an intermittently connected network. Simulation results show that BL-CAST outperforms the DV-CAST protocol in terms of the end-to-end delay, message delivery ratio and network overhead.