Efficient and Reliable Abiding Geocast Based on Carrier Sets for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In vehicular ad hoc networks, abiding geocast requires a persistent dissemination of information to an area within a period of time. Conventional periodical broadcast schemes need broadcast to the whole destination area in a multi-hop manner for each cycle, which produces significant network overhead. Besides, the fixed broadcast cycle cannot match the change of network topology, which may induce inefficient transmissions. Moreover, they cannot guarantee the reliability when the link quality is poor. In this letter, we propose an abiding geocast protocol based on carrier sets. Carrier sets are backbones set-up and maintained based on stability estimation index in each street. Uncovered vehicles passing by a destination area can get abiding messages through one-hop delivery from vehicles in carrier sets when they need the messages, which not only avoids significant overhead produced by multi-hop broadcast but also enhances the receiving probability. Simulation results have shown that our protocol is efficient and reliable.