DRIVE: An efficient and robust data dissemination protocol for highway and urban vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are an emerging technology that allows vehicles to form self-organized networks without the need of permanent infrastructure. VANETs have attracted the attention of the research community recently as they have opened up a myriad of on the road applications and increased their potential by providing intelligent transport systems. The envisaged applications, as well as some inherent VANET characteristics make data dissemination an essential service and a challenging task in these networks. Many data dissemination protocols have been proposed in the literature. However, most of these protocols were designed to operate exclusively in urban or highway scenarios and under dense or sparse networks. In addition, the existing solutions for data dissemination do not effectively address broadcast storm and network partition problems simultaneously. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel Data dissemination pRotocol In VEhicular networks (DRIVE) that relies exclusively on local one-hop neighbor information to deliver messages under dense and sparse networks. In dense scenarios, DRIVE selects vehicles inside a sweet spot to rebroadcast messages to further vehicles. Moreover, the protocol employs implicit acknowledgements to guarantee robustness in message delivery under sparse scenarios. DRIVE eliminates the broadcast storm problem and maximizes data dissemination capabilities across network partitions with short delays and low overhead. Simulation results show that DRIVE performs data dissemination with better efficiency than other algorithms, outperforming them in different scenarios in all the evaluations carried out. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.