Investigating the impact of message size and broadcast frequency on hybrid data dissemination protocol for VANETs

Delivering data with maximum efficiency to a widest possible reach is critical for most VANET applications. Multi-hop and store-and-forward are two mutually exclusive categories of ad hoc broadcast protocols that are used to disseminate data. Both these schemes have their strengths but also have weaknesses. In previous work, we proposed a novel hybrid protocol that capitalizes on the strengths and mitigates the weaknesses of these two categories. We evaluated the performance of our hybrid protocol by varying aggregation ratio, density, and the broadcast zone radius and got promising results. As an extension to our previous work, in this paper we investigate the behavior and performance of our proposed hybrid data dissemination protocol by varying the data message size and frequency of the broadcast messages. We use simulation to study the performance of the proposed hybrid protocol in comparison to pure store-and-forward and pure multi-hop broadcast protocols. Our results demonstrate that the hybrid protocol is effective in both the urban and highway mobility scenarios showing better latency than pure store-and-forward and less data sent than pure-multi-hop broadcast schemes.