• Journal of the Korean Data and Information Science Society
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.783-793
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• 2010

Several multi-hop applications developed for vehicular ad hoc networks use broadcast as a means to either discover nearby neighbors or propagate useful traffic information to other vehicles located within a certain geographical area. However, the conventional broadcast mechanism may lead to the so-called broadcast storm problem, a scenario in which there is a high level of contention and collisions at the link layer due to an excessive number of broadcast packets. We present a fuzzy alert message dissemination algorithm to improve performance for road safety alert application in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET). In the proposed algorithm, when a vehicle receives an alert message for the first time, the vehicle rebroadcasts the alert message according to the fuzzy control rules for rebroadcast degree, where the rebroadcast degree depends on the current traffic density of the road and the distance between source vehicle and destination vehicle. Also, the proposed algorithm is the hybrid algorithm that uses broadcast protocol together with token protocol according to traffic density. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated through simulation and compared with that of other alert message dissemination algorithms.