An Energy Efficient Risk Notification Message Dissemination Protocol for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

The high-level contribution of this paper is the design and development of an energy-efficient Risk Notification Message Dissemination Protocol (RNMDP) for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). RNMDP propagates Risk Notification Messages (RNMs) from their location of origin (called the Risk Zone) to vehicles approaching the Risk Zone. RNMDP assumes each node is aware of its current location in the network. The protocol works as follows: A RNM is broadcast in the neighborhood of the Risk Zone. A node receiving the RNM from another node waits for a Rebroadcast-Wait-Time before deciding to rebroadcast the message. The Rebroadcast-Wait-Time for a node is modeled based on the ratio of the distance between the node and the immediate sender of the RNM and the direction of movement of the node. Priority for rebroadcast is given for nodes farthest away from the sender and traveling towards the Risk Zone. Nodes that are traveling in lanes in direction away from the Risk Zone are also considered for rebroadcast, albeit with a larger Rebroadcast-Wait-Time. During the Rebroadcast-Wait-Time, if a node hears the same RNM again rebroadcast in the neighborhood, then the node stops from further broadcasting the message. If a node does not hear the RNM in its neighborhood during the RebroadcastWait-Time, the node broadcasts the message in its neighborhood. A RNM is considered to have been delivered to all the vehicles in the road, if the message reaches the Target Zone. The performance of RNMDP has been compared with that of the commonly used flooding strategy through extensive simulations conducted for highway networks with different number of lanes and lane density. Simulation results indicate that with a slightly larger delay (i.e., no more than 35% of the delay incurred for flooding), RNMDP can achieve the same message delivery ratio attained by flooding, but at a relatively much lower energy loss compared to flooding.