Efficient Broadcasting in IEEE 802.11 Networks through Irresponsible Forwarding

In a self-organizing vehicular network, vehicles share and distribute information by rebroadcasting a received information packet to their neighbors. An efficient broadcast technique can offer a high reactivity without sacrificing the communication reliability. Therefore, broadcast techniques are particularly suitable for safety-related vehicular transmissions, whose goal is reaching reliably the widest area in the shortest time. Among the numerous solutions appeared in the literature, the probabilistic broadcast approaches seem to be promising and not yet accurately analyzed. Since the interaction between a high level broadcasting protocol with the lower layers cannot be ignored, in this work we analyze the behavior of a recently proposed broadcast technique, denoted as the Irresponsible Forwarding (IF), in IEEE 802.11 networks. Our attention concentrates on the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer, which is affected by some critical impairments for broadcasting, such as the hidden terminal problem and self-interference. In this work, we evaluate the benefits brought by the use of IF to perform efficient broadcasting in IEEE 802.11 networks.