Analysis and evaluation of distance-to-mean broadcast method for VANET

Multi-hop broadcast is a critical component in embedded communication systems. Some vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) applications in particular use broadcast communications extensively. Statistical broadcast methods offer an efficient means of propagating broadcast messages in this context due to their low overhead and high efficiency.Currently, five fundamental statistical broadcast methods are known: stochastic, counter, distance, location, and the latest method, distance-to-mean (DTM). Utilizing positional information, the DTM method calculates the spatial mean of the neighbors from which a node has received the message, then finds the distance from the node to that of spatial mean. This distance is used as the variable to discriminate between rebroadcasting and non-rebroadcasting nodes. Simulation results are presented exploring the reachability characteristics of DTM, indicating a behavioral phase transition with respect to decision threshold.Detailed comparative evaluations of a straightforward protocol built using DTM show it is more efficient than a similar protocol built using the distance method. DTM is also compared to p-persistence and is shown to exhibit a higher level of reachability across a broad range of scenarios.