p-IVG: Probabilistic Inter-Vehicle Geocast for Dense Vehicular Networks

In this paper, we study the effect of dense vehicular networks on data dissemination. When using intelligent broadcasting techniques, such as Inter-Vehicle Geocast, we have discovered the spatial broadcast storm problem in which multiple vehicles will be chosen to re-broadcast frames at nearly the same time, resulting in channel contention and collisions. We present a probabilistic version of IVG (p-IVG) to address this problem. In p-IVG, which vehicles re-broadcast frames is probabilistic depending upon the traffic density surrounding the vehicles. We show that p-IVG solves the spatial broadcast storm problem and that using p-IVG results in improved reception rates, lower channel contention, and most importantly, faster dissemination of data to distant vehicles than IVG.