A New Solution to Perform Data Dissemination in Vehicular Networks

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) provide safety, traffic efficiency and user comfort for drivers and passengers. To reach these goals many envisaged applications for VANETs will rely on data dissemination, turning this task into an essential service in this network. However, due to some inherent VANET characteristics, such as intermittent connectivity, highly dynamic topology, and diverse network densities, data dissemination is a challenging activity. Although data dissemination has been extensively studied in the literature, existing solutions do not effectively address the broadcast storm and network partition problems when considered together. To deal with both problems, we propose a network partition-aware geographical data dissemination protocol for urban environments, which eliminates the broadcast storm problem and maximizes the data dissemination capability across network partitions with short delays and low overhead. The proposed algorithm is able to autonomic ally adjust message transmissions based on an autonomic computing approach. Simulation results show that our proposed approach provides good efficiency with respect to the coverage of the event and delay.