How to broadcast efficiently in vehicular ad hoc networks without GPS

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), a multi-hop broadcast protocol is required to disseminate traffic warning information to multiple receivers. Reducing broadcast message overhead is important because it could directly affect the packet collision probability and MAC layer contention time at each node. There have been some broadcast protocols for VANETs. However, many of them assume the availability of the global positioning system. In this paper, we propose a broadcast protocol which does not require position information. The protocol uses two-hop neighbor information to select relay nodes which are used to forward a packet. The proposed protocol also uses a joint redundancy and opportunistic transmission approach to recover a packet loss. We show the effectiveness of the proposed protocol by evaluating in a real vehicular ad hoc network.