A Distributed Priority-Based Rebroadcasting Protocol for VANETs: Mitigating the Storm Problem

Enhancing vehicle drivers’ safety and decreasing accidents are the current new challenges in traffic safety. Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) offer improvements addressing these challenges through their frequent topology changes. More specifically, VANETs communicate via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-roadside networks (V2R) mainly by broadcast. However, an effective rebroadcasting protocol must be designed carefully in order to maximize the reachability and minimize the delay and number of rebroadcasts, even in congested areas. Prior work minimizes one parameter at a time, congestion or latency, at the expense of reachability and the number of rebroadcasts. However, by considering environmental factors such as the number of received messages and distance to the event location, our proposed algorithm called Dynamic Hybrid Broadcasting Protocol DHBP outperforms prior work on reachability, number of rebroadcasts and delay, in different scenarios such as congested areas. We evaluate DHBP’s performances through NS2 simulations. Simulation results show that DHBP outperforms prior work in terms of several metrics.