Evaluation of message dissemination methods in VANETs using a cooperative traffic efficiency application

Due to the prohibitive cost of deploying a real vehicular network, most VANETs applications are evaluated using simulation. Considering that one important group of vehicular applications is related to cooperative traffic efficiency, this work evaluates the influence of road traffic warning message dissemination strategies on vehicular traffic and communication metrics. This study uses the prototype implementation of a simple adaptive traffic warning system deployed on the Veins simulation framework. The implemented scenario considers five distinct road incidents to evaluate the effect of three warning message dissemination strategies, based on: i) distance between the sender and the receiver; ii) maximum number of hops that a message is allowed to travel; and iii) probabilistic rebroadcasting. Results show that these strategies affect differently important metrics of road traffic (travel time, CO
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emission) and wireless communications (packet loss, duplicate packets).