SEAD: A simple and efficient adaptive data dissemination protocol in vehicular ad-hoc networks

International audienceVehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is becoming a promising technology for improving the efficiency and the safety of intelligent transportation systems by deploying a wide variety of applications. Smart vehicles are expected to continuously exchange a huge amount of data either through safety or non-safety messages dedicated for road safety or infotainment and passenger comfort applications, respectively. One of the main challenges posed by the study of VANET is the data dissemination design by which messages have to be efficiently disseminated in a high vehicular speed, intermittent connectivity, and highly dynamic topology. In particular, broadcast mechanism should guarantee fast and reliable data delivery within a limited wireless bandwidth in order to fit the real time applications’ requirements. In this work, we propose a simple and efficient adaptive data dissemination protocol called “SEAD”. On the one hand, the originality of this work lies in its simplicity and efficiency regardless the application’s type. Simplicity is achieved through a beaconless strategy adopted to take into account the surrounding vehicles’ density. Thanks to a metric locally measured, each vehicle is able to dynamically define an appropriate probability of rebroadcast to mitigate the broadcast storm problem. Efficiency is manifested by reducing excessive retransmitted messages and hence promoting the network capacity and the transmission delay. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol offers very low packet drop ratio and network load while still maintaining a low end-to-end delay and a high packet delivery. On the other hand, SEAD protocol presents a robust data dissemination mechanism which is suitable either for safety applications or for other kinds of application. This mechanism is able to adapt the protocol performance in terms of packet delivery ratio to the application’s requirements