BPAB: Binary Partition Assisted Emergency broadcast protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network has recently been considered as attractive network architecture to provide various services ranging from road safety to entertainment applications. In this paper, we propose an IEEE 802.11 based multihop broadcast protocol to address the issue of safety message dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks. This positionbased protocol adopts a repetitive 2-partition method to divide the area inside transmission range resulting in a furthest narrow segment and delegates the forwarding duty to a vehicle chosen in the furthest segment. The main focus of the paper lies in reducing broadcast delay which is an important factor in time critical safety applications. We attempt to attain consistent performance irrespective of node density and different VANET scenarios. In addition to this, the protocol also solves the hidden terminal problem of multihop broadcasting. Simulation results show that our protocol achieves greater performance in terms of latency and message progress when compared with other well known multihop broadcast protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks.