Improving reachability of multi-hop alert messages dissemination in VANETs

Alert messaging protocols based on vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are speculated as promising on-board applications for improving road safety. This work presents a novel alert broadcasting protocol based on estimated link qualities. Link quality estimations are based on the proposed Bi-Directional Stable Communication (BDSC) protocol which aims at achieving high reachability of alert messages. The new protocol makes better selection of relay nodes during multi-hop broadcasts, resulting in reachability improvement of alert messages over a platoon of vehicles. Simulation experiments reveal that in dense traffic scenarios, reachability of the proposed BDSC protocol outperforms the conventional furthest distance based relay selection protocols by more than 20%.