The vehicular environment and its effect on broadcast protocols in VANETs

The main objective of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is reliable delivery of emergency warning messages so that drivers can make well-timed decisions and prevent mishaps. The dynamic vehicular environment in VANETs makes it necessary to examine its effects on the network to ensure that the messages reach the intended vehicles in its range, on time. The objective of this paper is to monitor the 802.11 broadcasting protocol, 802.11e EDCA, as well as 802.11e EDCA with an adaptive contention window. The performance of these protocols is observed keeping in mind their sensitivity towards modeling of the vehicular environment. The results show that it is extremely important to consider the interaction between various vehicular settings and the network in order to build an efficient, robust and reliable broadcasting protocol, suitable for vehicular networks.