Title: Link quality estimation in VANETs for multi-hop alert messages dissemination

Authors: Osama M. Hussain Rehman; Mohamed Ould-Khaoua; Hadj Bourdoucen

Addresses: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Communication and Information Research Center, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Communication and Information Research Center, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman

Abstract: Reception of alert messages by endangered vehicles at time of an emergency event (e.g., a traffic accident) is a prime objective of alert messaging protocols in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). This work proposes a new bi-directional stable communication (BDSC) protocol for relay nodes selection in multi-hop alert messages propagation in VANETs. The BDSC protocol is based on a dynamic link quality estimation algorithm. The proposed protocol is evaluated by assessing the alert messages reachability in varying network size and traffic densities. Results obtained from extensive simulation experiments favour the performance of the proposed protocol with a large margin of reachability improvement compared to conventional furthest distance relay selection protocols. In a multi-lane road segment with dense traffic scenario, reachability improvement of approximately 25% is noticed over the furthest distance protocols. This reachability improvement is achieved with comparable end-to-end communication delays to those exhibited by furthest distance-based solutions.

Keywords: multi-hop alert messages; end-to-end delay; link quality estimation; reachability; vehicular ad hoc networks; VANETs; alert message dissemination; emergency events; traffic accidents; bi-directional stable communication; relay node selection; network size; traffic density; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2015.072395

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2015 Vol.15 No.4, pp.313 - 335

Received: 06 May 2014
Accepted: 28 Feb 2015
Published online: 12 Oct 2015 *

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