Mitigation of a Broadcast Storm Problem in a Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANETs)

In view to reduce accident risks and improve safety on public roads, the vehicular Ad hoc network (VANET) standard was developed to enable inter-vehicular communication and facilitate safety message exchange among the involved nodes. Moreover, a successful message exchange can only be possible if the transmission medium is collision free. Under the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), the cooperative Awareness messages (CAM) have to be transmitted at the rate of 10 Hz as per standard. To account for congestion management, the Distributed Congestion Control (DCC) mechanism was proposed. However, under higher node density, the DCC becomes inefficient and dramatically contribute to the deterioration of the VANET environment. The present work proposes a Dynamic Broadcast Storm Mitigation Algorithm (DBSMA) which can be used to combat the broadcast storm problem in a Vehicular Network (VN). The DBSMA is compared against the DCC and the Hi-CAST approach proposed in literature. Results from several simulations demonstrated the outperformance of the DBSMA over its peers by offering more than 150% improved efficiency against the Hi-CAST approach. Other advantage of the DBSMA is that it is simple to compute and easy to implement.