A Review of Information Dissemination Protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

With the fast development in ad hoc wireless communications and vehicular technology, it is foreseeable that, in the near future, traffic information will be collected and disseminated in real-time by mobile sensors instead of fixed sensors used in the current infrastructure-based traffic information systems. A distributed network of vehicles such as a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) can easily turn into an infrastructure-less self-organizing traffic information system, where any vehicle can participate in collecting and reporting useful traffic information such as section travel time, flow rate, and density. Disseminating traffic information relies on broadcasting protocols. Recently, there have been a significant number of broadcasting protocols for VANETs reported in the literature. In this paper, we classify and provide an in-depth review of these protocols.