A directional data dissemination protocol for vehicular environments

This paper presents a simple and robust dissemination protocol that efficiently deals with data dissemination in both dense and sparse vehicular networks. Our goal is to address highway scenarios where vehicles equipped with sensors detect an event, e.g., a hazard and broadcast an event message to a specific direction of interest. In order to deal with broadcast communication under diverse network densities, we design a dissemination protocol in such a way that: (i) it prevents the so-called broadcast storm problem in dense networks by employing an optimized broadcast suppression technique; and (ii) it efficiently deals with disconnected networks by relying on the store-carry-forward communication model. The novelty of the protocol lies in its simplicity and robustness. Simplicity is achieved by only considering two states (i.e., cluster tail and non-tail) for vehicles. Furthermore, vehicles in both directions help disseminating messages in a seamlessly manner, without resorting to different operation modes for each direction. Robustness is achieved by assigning message delivery responsibility to multiple vehicles in sparse networks. Our simulation results show that our protocol achieves higher delivery ratio and higher robustness when compared with DV-CAST under diverse road scenarios. 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.