Overcoming Broadcast Storm Problem in a Vehicular Network

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) has become a very interesting technology for future generation vehicles. This is mainly due to its embedded and promising advantages which primarily include improvement of safety conditions on public road through exchange of critical safety messages amongst involved nodes. The success of VANET heavily relies on successful messages dissemination amongst involved vehicles. However, a successful message exchange can only be possible if the transmission medium is collision free. Under the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), the cooperative Awareness messages (CAM) have to be transmitted at the rate of 10 Hz as per standard. To account for congestion management, the Distributed Congestion Control (DCC) mechanism was proposed. However, under higher node density, the DDC becomes inefficient and dramatically contribute to the deterioration of the VANET environment. The present work proposes a Dynamic Broadcast Storm Mitigation Algorithm (DBSMA) which can be used to combat the broadcast storm problem in a Vehicular Network (VN). Results from several simulations confirmed that the DBSMA has a potentiality to conquer the effect of broadcast storm by offering more than 150% improved efficiency against the DCC approach. Another advantage of the DBSMA is that it is simple to compute and easy to implement.