A decentralized approach for information dissemination in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

Substantial research efforts on Ad hoc networks have been devoted recently to Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) to target Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Roadside unit (V2R) communications in order to increase driver/vehicle safety, transport efficiency and driver comfort. VANETs are special subclass of Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) for inter-vehicle communication and have relatively more dynamic nature compared to MANETs due to the rapid network topology changes. The development and implementation of efficient and scalable algorithms for information dissemination in VANETs is a major issue which has taken enormous attention in the last years. In this paper, an efficient distributed information dissemination approach is proposed, inspired by Ant-colony communication principles, such as scalability and adaptability that are useful for developing a decentralized architecture in highly dynamic networks. The main objective is to provide each vehicle with relevant information about its surrounding to allow drivers to be aware of undesirable events and road conditions. A “relevance” value into emergency messages is defined as an analog to pheromone throwing in Ant colony, to take an appropriate action. Simulations are conducted using NS2 network simulator and relevant metrics are evaluated under different node speeds and densities to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.