A Novel Approach to Improve Information Dissemination in Vehicular Networks

Information dissemination in pure Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANET) becomes problematic when the network is sparse. This is certainly the case in the early years of market introduction, because of the low market penetration. Moreover, in rural areas or during night-time the vehicular network can become sparse due to low traffic density. Sparse vehicular networks become fragmented, resulting in disconnected clusters of vehicles due to the limited communication range of Car-to-Car (C2C) technology. These inherent VANET characteristics such as diverse network densities, highly dynamic topology and intermittent connectivity make data dissemination as an essential service and challenging task. Different approaches and protocols are studied to improve information dissemination in vehicular network. Most of these were designed to operate exclusively under sparse or dense networks. In addition the existing solution does not effectively address broadcast storm and network partition problem simultaneously. We propose a multi hop broadcast scheme which employs two mechanisms store-carry-forward and broadcast suppression to distribute the broadcast message to a group of vehicles, within area of interest, over diverse traffic condition with low delay, low overhead and high delivery ratio with the minimum of packet loss.