PreZcast: A Preferred-Zone Based Broadcast Protocol for Urban Areas of VANETs

Broadcasting is an important routing strategy for message delivery in a VANET. However, the broadcast storm caused by loads of duplicate data packets can be severe, which leads to intense contention among vehicle nodes and a large number of dropped packets. In this case, the efficiency of message delivery is limited. This paper considers a broadcast routing protocol specially designed for urban areas with dense traffic and a huge amount of data traffic, and proposes a Preferred-Zone based broadcast (PreZcast) protocol. To alleviate the broadcast storm and improve the efficiency of message delivery, PreZcast only allows neighbors located within a Preferred Zone (PreZ) of a source node to rebroadcast a received packet. The PreZ is chosen based on the initial location and the distribution of two-hop neighbors of the source node. To further validate PreZcast in a more realistic and irregular topology, we evaluate PreZcast with real datasets issued from Bologna road traffic. Moreover, MultiPoint Relay (MPR) is introduced to further reduce duplicate packets in the network. Simulation results show that as compared with the Flooding protocol, PreZcast approximately improves 15% of broadcast efficiency and reduces 65% of packets transmitted with 5% more energy consumption, while PreZcast with MPR improves 10% of broadcast efficiency and reduces 70% of packets transmitted with only 0.5% more energy consumption.