Evaluation of selective broadcast algorithms for safety applications in vehicular ad hoc networks

In English Just as the wireless communication technology develops further to achieve higher performance, new application areas emerge to challenge its limits. Vehicular ad hoc networks are one of these areas; and emergency situation warning is one of their most popular potential applications since traffic safety is a real concern for everyone. Due to the life-critical nature of emergency applications, however, it is extremely important to ensure the solutions proposed meet the high standards required, such as reliable, timely, and guaranteed delivery of the safety warning in a situation like car collision avoidance. In order to put the candidate solutions to the test and to evaluate their feasibility, we adopt the approach of computer simulation. We implement four different selective broadcast algorithms used for information dissemination in vehicular ad hoc networks, and compare their performance under identical and realistic simulation conditions. Our goal is to provide our reader with an evaluation focussing on the performance with respect to safety, rather than to classical network aspects like throughput, loss, and delay. Therefore, we define four new performance criteria to address the effectiveness, efficiency, timeliness, and overhead of the candidate broadcast algorithms in terms of safety warning delivery. The results we obtain using these criteria help us to understand better the design requirements of a high-performance selective broadcast algorithm.