An Adaptive Beacon-Based Scheme for Warning Messages Dissemination in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

For improving the traffic safety in intelligent transportation systems, vehicles that are formed by Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) conventionally disseminate warning messages to their nearby vehicles as soon as a dangerous situation occurs. However, the major challenge in VANETs is to develop an efficient data dissemination protocol for tackling the broadcast storm and network partition problems. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Beacon-based Data Dissemination (ABDDis) scheme to deal with these problems using only local one-hop neighbor information. The ABDDis scheme features a novel mechanism to adaptively adjust the beacon interval to reduce the channel load while maintaining the correct information about nearby vehicles. Additionally, a novel store-carry-forward (SCF) mechanism is proposed to overcome the network partition problem. The performance of the ABDDis scheme is evaluated in the Veins simulation framework that provides a bidirectional coupling between the network simulator OMNeT++ and the traffic simulator SUMO. The simulation result shows that the ABDDis scheme significantly mitigates the broadcast storm compared to other schemes and maintains a good coverage across various traffic densities. Moreover, the ABDDis scheme shows its robustness by being able to tolerate reasonable GPS drift.