Just as wireless communications develop
further to achieve higher performance, new application
areas emerge to challenge the limits. Vehicular ad hoc networks
are one of these areas, and emergency situation warning is one
of their most popular applications since traffic safety
is a concern for everyone. Due to the life-critical nature of
emergency applications, however, it is extremely important to
ensure the solutions proposed meet the standards required,
such as reliable and timely delivery of the safety
warning in a situation like car collision avoidance. In order to put
the candidate solutions to the test and evaluate their feasibility,
we adopt the approach of computer simulation. We implement
four different selective broadcast algorithms used for information
dissemination in vehicular ad hoc networks, and compare their
performance under identical realistic simulation conditions.
Our goal is to provide an evaluation focussing on
the performance with respect to safety, rather than to network aspects like throughput, loss, and delay. We
define four new performance criteria to address the effectiveness,
efficiency, timeliness, and overhead of the broadcast
algorithms in safety warning delivery. The results we
obtain using these criteria help us to understand better the
design requirements of a high-performance selective broadcast
algorithm.
Traffic Information Dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks