Autonomic Data Dissemination in Highway Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks with Diverse Traffic Conditions

A Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a subclass of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, which provides wireless communication among vehicles as well as between vehicles and roadside units. Providing safety, traffic efficiency and user comfort for drivers and passengers are promising goals of these networks. To reach these goals many envisaged applications for VANETs will rely on data dissemination, turning this task into an essential service. However, due to some inherent characteristics of VANETs, such as intermittent connectivity, highly dynamic topology, and diverse network densities, data dissemination is a challenging activity in this kind of network. Although data dissemination has been extensively studied in the literature, existing solutions do not effectively address the broadcast storm and network partition problems when considered together. To deal with both problems, we propose a network partition-aware geographical data dissemination protocol, which eliminates the broadcast storm and maximizes the data dissemination capability across network partitions with short delays and low overhead. The proposed algorithm is able to autonomically adjust message transmissions in the network. Simulation results show that our proposed approach provides good efficiency with respect to the coverage of event processing, delay and overhead.