ATENA: A Broadcast-Storm-Aware Solution for Highway Environments

The fast growth of ad hoc wireless communication, combined with advances of vehicular technology, has allowed the appearing of a new communication paradigm known as VANETs (Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks). This new communication paradigm is enabling to exploit the mobility of vehicles to disseminate information that can be: traffic jam, congested area, and eventual accident. We have focused on a broadcast protocol over VANETs to efficiently disseminate the information among the vehicles within an Area of Interest (AoI). The proposal of our broadcast protocol -ATENA- is to eliminate the broadcast storm problem and maximize data dissemination with short delays and low overhead. ATENA was compared with five well-known protocols from literature: DBRS, DV-CAST, SRD, Flooding, and AID. It shows, through the simulation, that our proposal has performed better than other five protocols, outperforming them in different scenarios in all the evaluations carried out.