A novel packet dropping policy for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

The characteristics of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) are challenging. Because nodes in VANETs have high mobility, intermittent connectivity usually happens. As a result, most of protocols in VANETs use “store and forward” techniques to increase the chances that a message can distribute into the network and finally reach the destination. In this paper, we proposed a novel packet dropping policy that drops the packet with the largest number of message copies when the buffer is full. We take advantages of periodic beacons to gather local information and use the information to calculate the number of copies. To evaluate our dropping policy, we compare with the traditional dropping policies including drop tail, drop front and random drop. Simulation results show that our dropping policy outperforms the traditional dropping policies in terms of reliability.