BROADTRIP: Broadcast for transit in platoons

As pervasive computing is becoming a reality, vehicular networking is becoming increasingly popular in the research community. The prospects of increasing safety and reducing energy expenditures lay at the heart of this surge of interest. A promising technology that allows to increase both safety and energy efficiency is automated driving, where vehicles follow each other and coordinate by message passing. It is essential to build such systems on top of solid communication building blocks, such as reliable and efficient broadcast protocols. In this paper we present BROADTRIP, a specialized broadcasting protocol for vehicles transiting in platoons. It leverages on location information and network coding in order to reduce the number of retransmissions needed to broadcast messages in platoons. We compare it with existing protocols through simulations, and show that BROADTRIP outperforms the next best comparable approach by 12% to 38% depending on settings.