Opportunistic clusters selection in a reliable enhanced broadcast protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks

This paper investigates a novel solution for efficiently broadcasting in vehicular networks. In high congested traffic scenarios, one of the most serious problems is the increase of packet collisions and medium contentions among vehicles which attempt to communicate. The effect results in a very high number of message copies and collisions within the vehicular network, which is sometimes called as broadcast storm. Our proposed technique, namely Selective Reliable Broadcast protocol (SRB), is intended to limit the number of packet transmissions, by means of opportunistically selecting neighboring nodes, acting as relay nodes. The number of forwarder vehicles is strongly reduced, while network performance is preserved. Simulation results have shown the effectiveness of SRB as compared to traditional broadcast protocol.