A self-adaptive data dissemination solution for intelligent transportation systems

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) rely on Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) to streamline the operation of vehicles by managing vehicle traffic, assisting drivers with safety and other information, along with the provisioning of convenience applications for passengers. For that, many applications and services use broadcast to perform the transmission of their data to intended recipients. However, due to the wireless medium and the characteristics inherent to vehicular environments, broadcasting becomes a challenging task. For instance, uncoordinated broadcasts may lead to severe packet collisions, thus resulting in network congestion. Such problem is well known as the broadcast storm problem. Moreover, the broadcasting mechanism must handle network disconnections, otherwise, the data delivery capability may be hampered. Although there are many studies that deal with these problems separately, very few consider a solution for both problems. Furthermore, those that handle both problems do not consider different scenarios, i.e., they only focus on urban or highway scenarios. Therefore, to deal with both problems and different scenarios, we propose a preemptive algorithm that automatically adjusts the data transmission process (PREDAT) to reduce the total number of collisions and maximize the data delivery capability across network disconnections. Simulation results show that our proposed solution induces short delays and a low overhead. Moreover, it provides good efficiency with respect to the coverage of the event and the distance to which the information is propagated.