Irresponsible Forwarding Under Real Intervehicle Spacing Distributions

One approach to the distribution of traffic information in a self-organizing traffic information system is multihop broadcasting. In this approach, each vehicle may simply rebroadcast an information packet that it receives from the others. However, rebroadcasting results in redundant retransmissions of the same information, leading to a useless occupation of the radio channel. Minimizing redundancy, while still guaranteeing reachability in the network, is a challenging task in multihop broadcasting. In our previous work, we introduced a new probabilistic-based broadcasting scheme, i.e., Irresponsible Forwarding (IF) , which could effectively reduce the redundancy. However, in the previous work, we only considered the scenario where the intervehicle spacing was exponentially distributed. In this paper, we generalize the concept of IF such that it can be applied to any intervehicle spacing distribution. In addition, we evaluate the performance of the IF protocol when it is applied in a realistic scenario (i.e., using real traffic traces). This paper shows that the IF protocol is able to limit packet redundancy all hours of the day effectively.