Beacon-free scalable multi-hop data dissemination in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

Broadcasting forms the basis of all types of communications in ad hoc networks. In Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), broadcasting is usually appropriate for data dissemination, since traffic data is of public interest and usually benefits a group of users rather than a specific individual. However, broadcasting in high density networks may easily lead to the broadcast storm problem due to high data redundancy and collisions. In VANETs, it is still challenging for data dissemination methods to address scalability in broadcasting under high densities, such that data redundancy is reduced while the delivery ratio is maintained. In this paper, we develop a beacon-free approach for data dissemination in multi-hop VAENT that relies on traffic regime estimation adaptively to provide scalable broadcast, without extra communication overhead. Simulation results show the efficiency of our approach in achieving low broadcasting overhead while maintaining a high delivery ratio.