Safety information dissemination in vehicular networks using facilities layer mechanisms

Vehicle ad-hoc networks are considered as an essential building block of future intelligent transportation systems. One of the major roles of vehicular communication is the dissemination of information on the road in order to increase the awareness of the drivers and improve road safety. The facilities layer is a recently standardized component in the vehicular communication architecture, with an important role to play in the process of information dissemination. In this paper, we propose facilities layer-based mechanisms for information propagation and we show they outperform classical network layer solutions. We also demonstrate that previous studies that do not consider the cohabitation of different types of safety messages on the vehicular control channel highly under-estimate the dissemination delay, which can lead to unrealistic assumptions in the design of safety applications.