Probabilistic information dissemination in vehicular ad hoc networks

Many of the applications in VANETs, especially the safety related ones, set up requirements for information dissemination which are different from conventional networks and are thus difficult to fulfill with existing strategies. In this chapter, we review recently proposed data dissemination schemes in VANETs and we present novel solutions and analytical evaluation tools. We focus on the use of probabilistic methods as these are known to provide effective solutions and at the same time address the highly stochastic nature of many of the processes involved in VANETs. We present a short range multi-hop broadcast scheme which employs speed adaptive probabilistic flooding to overcome the broadcast storm problem in the case of high traffic density, a hovering scheme which employs probabilistic flooding to overcome the intermittently connected nature of the network within the hovering area and finally, we establish analytically lower bounds on the probability of information propagation at an intersection taking into account the vehicle speeds and the traffic density which is reflected in the vehicle arrival rate.