Using roadmap profiling to enhance the warning message dissemination in vehicular environments

In recent years, new applications, architectures and technologies have been proposed for Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Regarding traffic safety applications for VANETs, warning messages have to be quickly disseminated in order to reduce the required dissemination time and to increase the number of vehicles receiving the traffic warning information. In the past, several approaches have been proposed to improve the alert dissemination process in multi-hop wireless networks, but none of them is adapted to the propagation features of the scenario. In this paper, we present an adaptive algorithm designed to improve the warning message dissemination process. With respect to previous proposals, our proposed scheme uses a mapping technique based on adapting the dissemination strategy according to the characteristics of the street area where the vehicles are moving. Our algorithm reported a noticeable improvement in the performance of alert dissemination processes in simulated scenarios based on real city maps.