Abstract:

Many applications in VANETs rely on reliable and efficient broadcast while broadcast has to face the so called broadcast storm problem due to the shared medium characteristic of radio channels. Probabilistic broadcast is a simple and effective way to suppress broadcast storm. However, all the existing probabilistic broadcast protocols for VANETs, except the DV-CAST, do not take the network division problem in low traffic density into consideration. On the basis of demonstrating the inherent shortcomings of DV-CAST and taking its idea of handling broadcast with local connectivity, we design and implement an enhanced local connectivity-based broadcast protocol. Simulation results show that the new protocol can achieve better reliability with lower overhead in both dense and sparse traffic scenarios.

Key words: VANETs, probabilistic broadcast, local connectivity