Urban multi-hop broadcast protocol for inter-vehicle communication systems

Abstract

Inter-Vehicle Communication Systems rely on multi-hop broadcast to disseminate information to locations beyond the transmission range of individual nodes. Message dissemination is especially difficult in urban areas crowded with tall buildings because of the line-of-sight problem. In this paper, we propose a new efficient IEEE 802.11 based multi-hop broadcast protocol (UMB) which is designed to address the broadcast storm, hidden node, and reliability problems of multi-hop broadcast in urban areas. Thisprotocol assigns the duty of forwarding and acknowledging broadcast packet to only one vehicle by dividing the road portion inside the transmission range into segments and choosing the vehicle in the furthest non-empty segment without apriori topology information. When there is an intersection in the path of the message dissemination, new directional broadcasts are initiated by the repeaters located at the intersections. We have shown through simulations that our protocol has a very high success rate and efficient channel utilization when compared with other flooding based protocols.