An Efficient Data Dissemination Scheme for Warning Messages in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are expected to be used for the dissemination of emergency warning messages on the roads. The emergency warning messages such as post crash warning notification would require an efficient multi hop broadcast scheme to notify all the vehicles within a particular area about the emergency. Such emergency warning applications have low delay and transmission overhead requirements to effectively transmit the emergency notification. In this paper, an adaptive distance based backoff scheme is presented for efficient dissemination of warning messages on the road. The proposed scheme adaptively selects the furthest vehicle as the next forwarder of the emergency message based on channel conditions. The detailed performance figures of the protocol are presented in the paper using simulations in the OPNET network simulator. The proposed protocol introduces lower packet delay and broadcast overhead as compared to standard packet broadcasting protocols for vehicular networks.