Impact of propagation environments on emergency message dissemination in VANETs

In this paper, we investigate the impacts of different radio propagation environments on the performance of emergency message dissemination Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). We compared the performances of the benchmark existing broadcast protocols for Emergency Message Dissemination in VANETs. We consider three different propagation models, namely, Log-Normal Shadowing, Longley-Rice, and Nakagami to model six different simulation scenarios of both highway and urban areas. The objective is to provide a qualitative assessment of the protocols applicability in different vehicular scenarios. It is demonstrated that Trinary Partition Black-Burst based Broadcast Protocol (3P3B) reduces the communication delay, increases dissemination speed, increase reliability, and outperforms the well-known existing broadcast protocols for emergency message dissemination in VANETs in all propagation environments. The benchmark protocols achieve high performance in various vehicular scenarios both in highway and urban areas. However, there is still some reliability issue needed to be addressed by all existing protocols, such as communications in a very crowded city where the received communication signal is strongly distorted.