An adaptive data dissemination protocol with dynamic next hop selection for vehicular networks

Data dissemination protocols suffer a critical drop in performance due to the topology changes and dynamic behavior of vehicular scenarios, which leads to increases in overhead rate, delivery delay and packet losses. Aiming at develop a protocol easily adaptable to dynamic vehicular scenarios, we propose TODD - an adaptive Traffic-Oriented Data Dissemination protocol. It leverages real-time traffic information to dynamically choose the best relay vehicles. This process is done by analyzing a metric calculated for each candidate vehicle, which may give preference to specific vehicle characteristics such as speed and distance to destination, based on the current traffic information. Besides that, a centralized version of TODD (CTODD) is proposed in order to deal with the lack of real-time traffic information stored in the vehicles. Simulation results show that both protocols can deliver up to 55% more packets with up to 85% less overhead than other important protocols from literature.