An adaptive solution for data dissemination under diverse road traffic conditions in urban scenarios

Abstract

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are an emerging technology that allows vehicles to form self-organized networks without the requirement of permanent infrastructure. VANETs have opened up a myriad of on the road applications and increased their potential by providing intelligent transport systems. The envisaged applications, as well as some inherent VANET characteristics (i.e., highly dynamic topology, diverse network densities, and intermittent connectivity) make data dissemination an essential service and a challenging task in these networks. Many data dissemination protocols have been proposed in the literature. However, most of these protocols were designed to operate exclusively under dense or sparse networks. In addition, the existing solutions for data dissemination do not effectively address broadcast storm and network partition problems simultaneously. To tackle these problems, we propose a suitable multi-hop broadcast protocol named as TURBO that relies exclusively on local one-hop neighbor information to deliver messages under dense and sparse networks. We compared our protocol with other protocols from literature - AID, DBRS, GEDDAI, and simple Flooding. Simulation results show that TURBO performs data dissemination with better efficiency than other protocols, outperforming them in different scenarios in all the evaluations carried out.