A Universal Geocast Scheme for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

A universal communications scheme for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is proposed. This scheme accounts for a diverse variety of VANET-speciflc characteristics such as the gradual introduction of technology, highly dynamic topology, road-constrained vehicle movement and the presence of obstacles. The scheme incorporates a geometrical framework previously proposed by the authors which makes it appropriate for urban as well as rural area deployments. Moreover, by making the scheme probabilistic, capacity-delay tradeoffs crucial for safety message exchange are addressed. Although the presence of infrastructure is a privilege to our scheme, the network can still operate in a pure ad hoc manner. Simulation results confirm that our heuristic method dramatically improves the probability of reception of nodes in different scenarios.