A driver safety information broadcast protocol for VANET

Due to the highly mobile nature of VANET, especially on highways, a reliable and fast penetration of emergency messages is required so that in-time decisions can be performed. A broadcast routing protocol can perform flooding in sparse network but it will suffer from high control overhead, higher delay and lower packet delivery ratio in dense environment. Since, a significant number of VANET messages including neighbour discovery, safety, destination discovery, location and service advertisements is broadcast, therefore, the area of broadcast routing is important and needs careful design considerations. In this article, we propose ZoomOut Broadcast Routing Protocol for driver safety information dissemination in VANET. In ZBRP, 1-hop neighbour discovery messages are used in an intelligent way based on the speed and inter-vehicle distance of 1-hop neighbours to select a front and a behind vehicle. A neighbour from the front area is called front relative while the neighbour from behind area is called behind relative. During the processing of multi-hop safety messages, only a front or a behind relative rebroadcasts a safety message whereas non-relatives drop it. ZBRP is compared with G-AODV, PGB and DV-CAST through ns-2 simulations. The results show that ZBRP performs better than the stated protocols in terms of network penetration time, packet delivery and broadcast suppression.