An efficient and robust data dissemination protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have emerged as an exciting research and application area. The envisioned applications, as well as some inherent VANET characteristics such as highly dynamic topology, frequently disconnected network, and different and dynamic network density, make data dissemination a challenging task in these networks. Several approaches for data dissemination in VANETs have been recently proposed in the literature. However, more work needs to be done since most of the proposed solutions do not effectively address some or all of the main challenges in these scenarios such as the broadcast storm, network partition and temporal network fragmentation. In this work we consider the broadcast storm problem. To tackle this challenge we propose a novel GEographical Data Dissemination for Alert Information (GEDDAI), which eliminates the broadcast storm and maximizes the capability of performing data dissemination across zones of relevance with low overhead, short delays and high coverage. Simulation results show that the data dissemination performed by GEDDAI provides the best efficiency compared with other algorithms, outperforming them for different scenarios in all performed evaluations.