A Distance-Based Directional Broadcast Protocol for Urban Vehicular Ad Hoc Network

The topology of a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) changes rapidly due to high-speed movement of vehicles, so traditional mobile ad hoc network (MANET) broadcast protocol may not work efficiently in VANET. This paper proposes a distance-based broadcast protocol called Efficient Directional Broadcast (EDB) for VANET using directional antennas. In EDB, only the furthest receiver is responsible to forward the packet in the opposite direction where the packet arrives. Besides, a directional repeater located at the intersection helps disseminating the packets to the vehicles on other road segments of different directions. We evaluate the performance of EDB based on a real mobility model generated by live GPS data of taxis in the city of Shanghai. The result shows that EDB is effective and favorable for VANET.