Improving reliability of emergency message dissemination in VANETs

This paper proposes a novel MAC sub-layer mechanism in order to improve reliability of emergency message dissemination in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks. We consider a VANET that uses IEEE 802.11e MAC sub-layer. We propose enhancements in the multi-access policies of the original IEEE 802.11e standard in order to automatically reduce the volume of data traffic for non-safety applications allowing less contention for safety related message dissemination. Comprehensive simulation results in different scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of packet reception rate and medium access delay for safety related applications.