Disseminating Messages among Highly Mobile Hosts based on Inter-Vehicle Communication

We present an approach to distributing messages among highly mobile hosts in ad hoc networks. We focus on using direct radio communication between moving vehicles on the road that requires no additional infrastructure. Thus, the vehicles need to organize access to the radio channel in a decentralized manner. We derive the medium access control from the standard IEEE 802.11. Also, the vehicles use omnidirectional antennas implying that a sender can transmit to multiple hosts simultaneously. As an example, we study a road accident that is reported to nearby vehicles. Simulations show us the quality of the proposed protocol by measuring how many vehicles inside a zoneof-relevance are informed under various conditions.