Delay-based strategy for safety message dissemination in Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks: Slotted or continuous?

The diversity of applications' types in Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) has spawned a large variety of messages that need to be efficiently disseminated between connected vehicles. The most critical messages are those dedicated for safety applications such as road hazardous warning, signal violation warning, etc. The dissemination of this sort of messages is considered as a challenging task in mobile networks where the topology changes dynamically. Indeed, transmitted messages should achieve a high data reachability within a limited transmission delay and an acceptable overhead in a Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication mode. In this work, we focus on a special type of data dissemination protocols based on the delay strategy. The purpose of this paper is to compare two basic distinguished techniques, namely the slotted technique and the continuous technique, and study in depth their impact on the data dissemination performance. A proper selection of the convenient technique according to the application's requirements is consequently deduced. For a faithful and rigorous study, simulations are performed by means of ns-3 simulator under a realistic VANET environment in terms of map layout, mobility pattern and radio model. Simulation results show that contrary to the theoretical reflection, slotted technique is approved as the most appropriate one for safety message dissemination. This technique achieves the same packet data ratio and redundancy ratio, compared to the continuous one, while reducing the data transmission delay.