Vehicular Multi-Hop Broadcasting Protocol for Safety Message Dissemination in VANETs

Most safety-related applications targeting at Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) use Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) broadcast method to disseminate safety-related information to all surrounding vehicles. However, the conventional broadcast schemes have the broadcast storm problem which can lead to unbearable transmission delay and packet loss. In this paper, we present an efficient broadcast scheme referred as Vehicular Multi-hop broadcasting Protocol (VMP) for fast dissemination of safety message within the critical area. The core of the VMP is that it designates multiple reliable forwarders with differentiated forwarding delay, and exploits cooperative forwarding mechanism to help the forwarding when the specified forwarders fail to transmit the alert message. With the realistic simulation studies, the VMP demonstrates better performance than previous contention-based schemes by reducing end-to-end delay and message rebroadcasting ratio while keeping high message reception rate.