Optimized Position Based Gossiping in VANETs

Mechanisms for information dissemination are essential for many applications in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). Currently, simple flooding is often supposed to broadcast information within a geographic region, as for example in many geocast protocols. However, simple flooding has several drawbacks: every node rebroadcasting a message leads to redundancy, contention, and collision, to which is referred as the broadcast storm problem. Hence, in order to fulfill the applications' requirements, more efficient solutions are necessary. In this work we introduce three extensions to an existing probabilistic broadcast protocol to be capable to achieve high reception rates with a wide range of vehicle densities, at the same time lowering the communication complexity. The efficiency of the protocol is shown by simulations in an intersection and highway scenario and its superiority over flooding and the basic protocol is presented.