Using Overhearing and Rateless Coding in Disseminating Various Messages in Vehicular AdHoc Networks

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are emerging technologies with the primary purpose of establishing Vehicular communications. Available protocols for data dissemination in VANETs are faced with issues like discontinuous connections, uncertainty about receiving messages, collisions, and latency. In this paper, a new method is presented for the dissemination of advertising and infotainment messages. The proposed method has used store carry and forward (SCF), rateless coding, and a new handshake mechanism to solve discontinuous connections, uncertainty about receiving messages, and collision problems, respectively. In this paper, changing the Road Side Unit (RSU) message over time and its impact on the network is proposed as a new step in evaluating data dissemination methods. Our results showed that if changing the RSU message happened very rapidly, the network performance will almost be eliminated; to address this problem and due to the advertising nature of messages, the use of overhearing has been suggested. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that message overhearing has been used in VANET. Extensive and accurate simulations results show that the proposed method for 2, 3, 5, and 10 messages: (i) reduces the overhead of handshake on average 70% 63%, 48%, and 3%, (ii) increases the number of delivered packets on average 5%, 22%, 75%, and 84%, and (iii) increases the range of data dissemination on average 47%, 187%, 661%, and 2962%, respectively. With the mentioned improvements, the proposed method can also significantly reduce the latency of disseminating messages between vehicles.