Infotainment traffic flow dissemination in an urban VANET

Inter-vehicle communications will play an important role in future cars and traffic management in general. Many different services have been proposed in the literature using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. These services include safety applications like collision warning, up-to-date traffic information, active navigation, and also infotainment. Efficient data dissemination in vehicular networks (VANET) is of particular interest for both safety and infotainment services. In case of infotainment services, which are the object of our study, data dissemination is used to extend the radio coverage area of a Road Side Unit (RSU) to reach all users that can be interested in a given service. In this work, we propose a family of algorithms to extend the RSU coverage area in VANETs. These algorithms apply simple geometrical rules based on the position of the sending nodes. The algorithms are used to allow the data to cross road junctions and to propagate towards multiple directions, without using beacon or hello messages. By applying a simple geometrical analysis we show that the proposed solutions are able to increase the number of nodes reached by a broadcast message. Moreover, we study the performance of our solution through message flows injected in a dynamic scenario, where a Manhattan street grid is reproduced and populated through SUMO, which is able to provide realistic vehicle flows. The effect of traffic lights on vehicle flows in relation to network performance is also discussed. © 2012 IEEE.