Bandwidth efficient broadcasting in VANETs

Wireless communications amongst vehicles bring the opportunity for a wide range of applications, from safety aid to passenger entertainment. The necessity to broadcast information to several-hop neighbors is common to most of the potential application protocols. Broadcast protocols for VANETs based on diverse techniques have already been proposed. In this article, we compare basic broadcast schemes that are not dependent on neighbor knowledge using ns-2 - simple flooding, probabilistic, counter-based, distance-based and traffic-based broadcast. The objective is to obtain general directions for the design of a bandwidth efficient broadcast. Based on this comparison, we have selected distance-based flooding and proposed a scheme that is easy to adjust to the application´s necessities.