A New Probabilistic Multi-Hop Broadcast Protocol for Vehicular Networks

The most important application of vehicular networks is the dissemination of safety information via broadcasting protocols. How to reduce the redundant retransmission of the same information to avoid excessive channel collisions while ensure low latency and high reliability of the dissemination over the network has become the most challenging problem for multi-hop broadcasting protocols. The existing solutions use either probability-based multi-hop broadcasting for low latency or time-based deterministic approaches for high reliability. In this work, we propose a new probability-based multi-hop broadcast protocol to overcome the reliability and latency issues. First, we propose to assign a higher forwarding probability to the nodes that are farther from the source node by using a node's index number and other parameters, which is different from the existing probability-based approaches. The parameters can be adjusted for a higher forwarding success probability and maintain the required reliability of the message delivery. Second, we propose a clustering architecture so that redundancy and latency issues can be significantly reduced. Third, we analyze the protocol performance, such as the forwarding success probability, the average number of copies, and the average one-hop delay. The effectiveness of the proposed protocol has been demonstrated by extensive simulation results with significantly improved network performance.