Efficient road topology based broadcast protocol for VANETs

Intelligent Transportation Systems have been instrumental in reshaping transportation towards safer roads, seamless logistics, and digital business-oriented services under the umbrella of smart city platforms. Broadcasting transmission is an essential operational technique that serves a broad range of applications which demand different restrictive QoS provisioning levels. Although broadcast communication has been investigated widely in highway vehicular networks, it is undoubtedly still a challenge in the urban environment due to the obstacles. In this paper, we propose the Road-Topology based Broadcast Protocol (RTBP) is proposed, a distance and contention-based forwarding scheme suitable for both urban and highway vehicular environments. RTBP aims at assigning the highest forwarding priority to a car, called a mobile repeater, having the greatest capability to send the packet in multiple directions. Realistic experimental environments are used to test the performance against well-known protocols. The results show that RTBP can reduce latency, increase reachability and save system resources.