RBO-EM: Reduced Broadcast Overhead Scheme for Emergency Message Dissemination in VANETs

Effective information dissemination constitutes the cornerstone of communication in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). Avoiding broadcast storm is one of the considerable challenges in the development of an effective dissemination scheme for VANETs, which leads to extensive rebroadcasting. Reliable emergency messages delivery is another substantial measure of performance, especially in dense traffic and high mobility scenarios. A generic solution to deal with these problems is to cluster vehicles, so that emergency messages can be re-broadcasted to adjacent clusters only by a smaller number of vehicles. Thus, reliable selections of cluster head and relay nodes are important to reduce the number of retransmissions. In this regard, we propose a clustering technique for Reduced Broadcast Overhead Scheme for Emergency Message Dissemination (RBO-EM). RBO-EM is based on the mobility metrics to strengthen the cluster formation, avoid communication overhead and maintain the message reliability in a high mobility scenario. Moreover, we introduce relay nodes based on estimated link stability to limit the number of retransmissions. RBO-EM is evaluated against eminent schemes by varying traffic densities and speed. Simulation results indicate that RBO-EM enables a reasonable performance gain in terms of coverage, end-to-end delay and message reliability.