An efficient and robust protocol to disseminate data in highway environments with different traffic conditions

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) are a specific type of moving networks in which the nodes are vehicles with processing, storage and wireless communication capacity. VANETs face a number of challenges in terms of data dissemination due to the volatile density of vehicles and frequent changes in the network topology induced by the high mobility of the vehicles and of short-range communications. The envisaged applications, as well as some inherent characteristics of the VANETs render the data dissemination an essential service and a challenging task in these networks. Many data dissemination protocols have been proposed in the literature, nevertheless, most of such protocols do not deal simultaneously with the problems of broadcast storm and network partition. To face such problems, we propose a new data dissemination protocol in vehicular networks named DRIFT, which operates in highway environments. The DRIFT eliminates the broadcast storm problem and maximizes the data dissemination in partitioned networks with little delay and low overhead. When compared with four known solutions, we show that our proposal for data dissemination executes it with higher efficiency than other protocols, exceeding them in different scenarios in all the undertaken evaluations.