An efficient alert dissemination protocol in a vehicular ad hoc network

Dissemination of alerts is one of the most important applications which aims to avoid the road traffic risks. Classical solutions are based on the well known flooding strategy which uses multi-hop broadcast to reach a large number of vehicles. The principle problem faced with these solutions is how to decrease the number of relay nodes because this is the key to reduce broadcast storm effects. The main contribution of this paper is that it presents a protocol that uses both the unicast and the broadcast modes and shows by simulation that the proposed protocol achieves low latency in delivering alerts in spite of the use of unicast messages.