Data dissemination in highway scenarios using car-to-car communication

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are a specific type of mobile networks in which the nodes are vehicles with capability of processing, storing, and wireless communication. VANETs face a number of challenges in terms of data dissemination due to volatile vehicle density and the frequent network topology changes induced by high mobility of vehicles and short-range communications. The envisaged applications, as well as some inherent VANET characteristics make data dissemination an essential service and a challenging task in these networks. Many data dissemination protocols have been proposed in the literature. However, most of these protocols do not effectively address broadcast storm and network partition problems simultaneously. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel data dissemination protocol in vehicular networks (ATENA) to operate in highway environment. ATENA selects vehicles inside a sweet spot to rebroadcast messages to further vehicles. Moreover, the protocol employs implicit acknowledgements to guarantee robustness in message delivery under sparse scenarios. ATENA eliminates the broadcast storm problem and maximizes data dissemination capabilities across network partitions with short delays and low overhead. When compared to five well-known solutions — DBRS, DV-CAST, SRD, Flooding and AID — we show that our proposal performs data dissemination with better efficiency than other algorithms, outperforming them in different scenarios in all the evaluations carried out.