A Survey and Comparative Study of Broadcast Warning Message Dissemination Schemes for VANETs

TLDR

Vehicle‑to‑vehicle (VANET) communications enable cooperative driving for safety and efficiency, and warning‑message dissemination is a key solution, yet existing evaluation studies vary in conditions and tools, hindering optimal scheme selection. The study aims to reduce warning‑message delivery latency while ensuring prompt, accurate reception by nearby vehicles during dangerous situations. The authors review recent broadcast dissemination schemes and conduct a fair comparative analysis using a unified simulation platform, identical environmental conditions, and common metrics. The study offers researchers a clear guideline of each scheme’s benefits and drawbacks.

Abstract

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications also known as vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) allow vehicles to cooperate to increase driving efficiency and safety on the roads. In particular, they are forecasted as one of the key technologies to increase traffic safety by providing useful traffic services. In this scope, vehicle-to-vehicle dissemination of warning messages to alert nearby vehicles is one of the most significant and representative solutions. The main goal of the different dissemination strategies available is to reduce the message delivery latency of such information while ensuring the correct reception of warning messages in the vehicle’s neighborhood as soon as a dangerous situation occurs. Despite the fact that several dissemination schemes have been proposed so far, their evaluation has been done under different conditions, using different simulators, making it difficult to determine the optimal dissemination scheme for each particular scenario. In this paper, besides reviewing the most relevant broadcast dissemination schemes available in the recent literature, we also provide a fair comparative analysis by evaluating them under the same environmental conditions, focusing on the same metrics, and using the same simulation platform. Overall, we provide researchers with a clear guideline of the benefits and drawbacks associated with each scheme.