Intelligent hybrid adaptive broadcast for VANET

Multi-hop broadcast communication is one of the main communication mechanisms to propagate safety and non-safety messages through vehicles in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). In our previous work, we proposed two broadcast schemes, fuzzy logic-based broadcast (FLB) and bandwidth-efficient fuzzy logic-assisted broadcast (BEFLAB). FLB offers high level of reachability where BEFLAB is more bandwidth efficient. While high reachability is a challenge in sparse networks, bandwidth efficiency is needed in dense networks. The goal of this paper is to propose an intelligent hybrid adaptive broadcast (IHAB) scheme that combines the strength of FLB and BEFLAB. In order to design a bandwidth efficient VANET broadcast scheme with high level of reachability, a receiver vehicle determines its number of common neighbors with the transmitting neighbors and treat it as the potential transmit density (PDT). If PDT exceeds a threshold (dense network) the receiver vehicle will use BEFLAB method to decide whether to rebroadcast, otherwise (sparse network)FLB will be used. Ns-3 simulations have been developed to investigate the effectiveness of our proposed system in terms of reachability, the average number of rebroadcasts per covered node, and bytes sent per covered node. The proposed protocol performed well compared to FLB, BEFLAB, DTM, DADCQ, SLAB, and CSBD. Overall, IHAB is shown to have higher reachability level than BEFLAB and better bandwidth efficiency than FLB.