DBSMA Approach for Congestion Mitigation in VANETs

A high rate of historical accidents on public roads motivated the advent of the Wireless Acces in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) standard. The main objective of WAVE was to develop strategies and protocols to enable inter-vehicular communication in view to reduce accident on public roads. Moreover, a successful message exchange can only be possible if the transmission medium is collision free. Under the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), the cooperative Awareness messages (CAM) have to be transmitted at the rate of 10 Hz as per standard. To account for congestion management, the Distributed Congestion Control (DCC) mechanism was proposed. However, under higher node density, the DDC becomes inefficient and dramatically contribute to the deterioration of the VANET environment. The present work proposes a Dynamic Broadcast Storm Mitigation Algorithm (DBSMA) which can be used to combat the broadcast storm problem in a Vehicular Network (VN). Results from several simulations confirmed that the DBSMA has a potentiality to conquer the effect of broadcast storm by offering higher robustness compared to DCC with about 130% improved efficiency. Beside its computational simplicity, the DBSMA is easy to implement.