Efficient Data Dissemination for Urban Vehicular Environments

Vehicular communication systems play an important role in the context of smart cities. Different applications are being proposed and evaluated to improve our daily driving in terms of safety and convenience. These applications require efficient data dissemination that guarantees full coverage with minimum overhead and delay. Existing data dissemination protocols often rely on extra communication to gather knowledge about the neighborhood and set the dissemination criteria accordingly. This extra communication poses serious overhead issues that affect the scalability of data dissemination, which is an essential criterion under high density scenarios. In this paper, we propose and evaluate an Efficient multi-directional Data Dissemination Protocol (EDDP), which considers the requirements of an urban vehicular environment without requiring the extra communication overhead. We rely only on simple local data to indicate the road condition for better dissemination performance. In this paper, the design considerations of urban layout include message format, broadcast suppression mechanism, and delay control. The EDDP utilizes the properties of the received messages along with positioning information to make decisions on suppressing broadcasts, with the objective of improving coverage in different directions without unnecessary transmissions. Simulation results show that the EDDP can effectively disseminate traffic data with a high data delivery ratio and a minimized overhead.