A data dissemination mechanism for motorway environment in VANETs

An efficient data dissemination mechanism is very critical for traffic safety and inquiring path information. All vehicles go straight and do not consider the effect of traffic lights during its running in the motorway. But in view of characteristic of motorway, the fast moving of vehicles will cause the frequent changes of network topology, which is a challenge for data dissemination for motorway environment in Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). This paper proposes a novel data dissemination mechanism for VANETs which apply to broadcasting and on-demand unicast scenarios. We firstly propose a weighted K-nearest neighbors prediction algorithm with self-feedback to predict the current speed of a vehicle and construct a set of forwarders for emergency message broadcasting. To satisfy users’ personal demands, the paper also designs a unicast mechanism based on information urgent level and the improved Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) protocol. The simulation results show that our proposed method can achieve better performance with higher delivery ratio, lower number of forwarders, and less copies of messages.