GPS-based message broadcast for adaptive inter-vehicle communications

Abstract

The intelligent transportation systems (ITS) use advanced communications and control technologies to improve current transportation systems. To achieve many ITS applications, the ability to exchange messages between vehicles is necessary. This is generally required as inter vehicle communication (IVC). IVC can be considered as a special case of ad hoc networks, where nodes only move along predefined road paths. We propose new broadcast protocols that make use of global positioning system (GPS) information to enhance the performance of broadcast service in IVC. The ability to efficiently broadcast messages is necessary for any communications in IVC (e.g, updating routing tables, etc). We propose two algorithms that effectively reduce the number of re-broadcast messages without affecting the number of hosts (vehicles) that receive the broadcast. The simulation results show up to several hundred percentage of bandwidth utilization improvement can be achieved by our proposed broadcast protocols.