A novel approach for scalable multi-hop data dissemination in vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) have the potential to improve road safety and travel convenience, by providing self-organizing decentralized environments to disseminate traffic data, without requiring fixed infrastructure. The public interest of traffic data makes it appropriate for VANET data dissemination methods to rely on broadcasting. However, scalability issues arise when broadcasting under high density scenarios, where the high percentage of data redundancy and packet collisions may easily lead to the broadcast storm problem. Existing solutions either do not scale well under high density scenarios, or require extra overhead to estimate traffic density, so as to manage data dissemination accordingly. In this paper, we provide a novel approach for data dissemination in multi-hop VAENT that relies on traffic regime estimation to provide scalable broadcast, without extra communication overhead. Simulation results show the efficiency of our broadcasting approach in achieving low broadcasting overhead while maintaining the high data delivery ratio. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.