RPB-MD: Providing robust message dissemination for vehicular ad hoc networks

To improve traffic safety and efficiency, it is vital to reliably send traffic-related messages to vehicles in the targeted region in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, relative position based message dissemination (RPB-MD), to reliably and efficiently disseminate messages to the vehicles in the zone-of-relevance. Firstly, the relative position based (RPB) addressing model is proposed to effectively define the intended receivers in the zone-of-relevance. To ensure high message delivery ratio and low delivery delay, directional greedy broadcast routing (DGBR) is introduced to make a group of candidate nodes hold the message for high reliability. Moreover, to guarantee efficiency, the protocol time parameters are designed adaptively according to the message attributes and local vehicular traffic density. The protocol feasibility is analyzed to illustrate the robustness and reliability of RPB-MD. Simulation results show that RPB-MD, compared with representative existing schemes, achieves high delivery ratio, limited overhead, reasonable delay and high network reachability under different vehicular traffic density and data sending rate.