Analysis of probabilistic flooding in VANETs for optimal rebroadcast probabilities

Abstract

A number of probabilistic flooding schemes have been recently considered in VANETs to address problems of information dissemination in safety applications. The design approach has so far been simulative, a method which does not guarantee that the derived protocols will work when the simulation settings are violated in practice. In this paper, motivated by the need to design information dissemination protocols with verifiable properties prior to implementation, we employ mathematical models of single and multiple lane roads to investigate probabilistic flooding in VANETs using mathematical analysis. We demonstrate that the system can be described by linear difference equations the solutions of which yield the probability of all vehicles receiving the critical message as a function of the rebroadcast probability, the number of neighbors of each vehicle and the number of vehicles. We utilize the obtained solutions to derive the desired rebroadcast probabilities as a function of the transmission range, the vehicle density and the dissemination distance. The obtained results are in line with results obtained using extensive simulations and can be used as a baseline to develop information dissemination protocols with verifiable properties.