Recursive analytical performance evaluation of broadcast protocols with silencing: application to VANETs

In this article, we present a novel theoretical framework suitable for analytical performance evaluation of a family of multihop broadcast protocols. The framework allows to derive several average performance metrics, including reliability, latency, and efficiency, and it is targeted to Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) applications based on an underlying IEEE 802.11 protocol. It builds on the assumption that the positions of the nodes of a VANET can be statistically modeled as Poisson points. However, the proposed approach holds for any spatial vehicle distribution with constant average distance between consecutive vehicles. In this work, the proposed analytical framework is applied to the class of probabilistic broadcast multihop protocols with silencing, but can be generalized to nonprobabilistic protocols as well. More specifically, this work considers a few broadcast protocols with silencing, differing for the probability assignment function. The validity of the proposed analytical approach is assessed by means of numerical simulations in a highway-like scenario.