An Adaptive Control Structure Based Fast Broadcast Protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Multi-hop broadcast schemes are commonly used by safety applications to disseminate urgent messages in vehicular ad hoc networks. Sender-based schemes can effectively decrease the collisions caused by simultaneous transmissions among different candidate forwarders and speed up the whole broadcast progress by piggy-backing extra control information in the broadcast message to candidate forwarders. However, the construction and delivery of control information are usually of high cost. In this letter, we present a novel sender-based broadcast protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks. An index-based control structure is proposed for the definition of the control information. A segment-based partition algorithm, which is adaptive to the distribution of forwarder candidates, is proposed to minimize the size of the control information. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve faster broadcast than other existing sender-based schemes.