Information dissemination in VANETS by piggybacking on beacons — An analysis of the impact of network parameters

Piggybacking on beacons is a forwarding technique that is regularly used in vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) research as a means to disseminate data. With this technique data is attached to and transmitted along with scheduled beacons, without changing the timing of the beacons. In this paper we evaluate the effect that several network parameters - such as the network density, the beacon frequency, and the transmission power level - have on the piggybacking performance. As performance metrics we measure the delay, the reception probability, and the reception probability as a function of time elapsed since transmission. Our eventual goal is to model the latter metric as a function of the network parameters. Here we analyse which network parameters should be taken into account in such a model. We show that the transmission power, the transmission bit rate, the inter-node distance, the dissemination distance, and the beacon frequency should be taken into account.