PAWDS: A Roadmap Profile-Driven Adaptive System for Alert Dissemination in VANETs

In traffic safety applications for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), warning messages have to be disseminated whenever a dangerous situation occurs to alert nearby vehicles. Using inefficient broadcast schemes may lead to ineffective dissemination of warning messages causing broadcast storm problems. In the past, several approaches have been proposed to reduce the so called broadcast storm in multi-hop wireless networks, but none of them is adapted to the features of the propagation scenario. In this paper, we present the Profile-driven Adaptive Warning Dissemination Scheme (PAWDS) to improve the warning message dissemination process. With respect to previous proposals, our PAWDS scheme uses an adaptive technique based on tuning the operation of the dissemination scheme according to the characteristics of the street area where the vehicles are moving. Our algorithm reported a noticeable improvement in the performance of alert dissemination processes in simulated scenarios based on real city maps.