Position-based Vehicular Clustering for Emergency Messages Dissemination in Zone of Interest

Disseminating Emergency Messages (EMs) to a maximum number of vehicles with low latency in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) can help reduce road accidents. Nevertheless, timely delivery of EMs to a maximum number of vehicles while suppressing redundant transmissions to avoid broadcast storms is challenging. Traditional cluster-based EM dissemination schemes treat all EMs equally and disseminate them across the entire road, increasing rebroadcast ratio and message collisions. Since not all EMs need to cover the entire road, it is essential to broadcast EMs based on their Zone of Interest (ZoI). Therefore, we propose a cluster-based scheme for EM Dissemination in ZoI (EMD-ZoI). The scheme uses information contained in EMs to determine ZoI. We also introduce a relay vehicle based on link lifetime to reduce retransmissions and latency. Simulation results show that EMD-ZoI provides a good performance gain in terms of coverage information, latency and rebroadcast ratio.