Improving Beacon-Based Routing Protocols Using Dynamic Coverage Area Determination

In vehicular Ad Hoc network, beacon messages help the beacon-based routing protocols to know much information of its neighbors and also to take immediately routing decision for selecting the next forwarder vehicle, resulting in improved delivery delay performance. In vehicle dense environment, these protocols suffer from the increase of unwanted beacon overhead and the packet collision, resulting in an increase of the packet drop rate. For this reason, we propose to dynamically change the coverage area of each vehicle according to the density of its neighbors and their positions in its coverage area. Then, we set the transmission power as function of the calculated coverage area by using two-ray ground propagation model. Simulation results show that our proposal decreases in an important manner the beacon overheads and increases the packets delivery ratio.