Geo-dissemination in vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs) aim to improve road safety and convenience through vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communications. Traffic information and accident warnings are often disseminated to vehicles in certain areas where driving could be affected by hazardous situations. Such message dissemination with destinations confined in specific geographic regions is referred to as Geo-Dissemination. In this paper, we analyze how far a geo-dissemination can possibly reach over a period of time t (denoted as dissemination distance D(t)), and what is the latency for a message to reach locations that are d distance far from the source (denoted as the stopping time τ). Simulations results of two dissemination methods (stateless opportunistic forwarding and GPS-based message broadcasting) are compared with our analytic results.