Adaptive information hovering in VANETs: Robustness and enhancements

Information hovering is relevant in vehicular ad hoc networks in cases where critical information needs to be made available to all vehicles in a bounded geographical area, called the hovering area, for a specific amount of time. In cases of low traffic density within the hovering area, a number of vehicles may not receive the critical information due to partitioning of the vehicular network. In previous work we proposed an information hovering scheme which increases the achieved reachability, by employing probabilistic flooding outside the hovering area. Informed vehicles outside the hovering area offer alternative paths towards the uninformed vehicles thus increasing reachability. In this work we investigate the robustness of the proposed protocol with respect to changing hovering area, transmission range of the vehicles and the message loss probability. We verify that the protocol continues to work effectively in all scenarios outperforming other approaches which have been proposed in literature. In addition, we investigate enhancements to the proposed protocol which ensure improved performance in cases of high traffic density within the hovering area. We apply probabilistic flooding within the hovering area and we observe that retransmission probabilities less than one suffice to lead to high reachability values.