A Message Broadcast Scheme using Contention Window in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network

Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET), a kind of mobile ad-hoc network (MANET), is a key technology for building intelligent transportation system (ITS). VANET is automatically and temporarily established through vehicle-to-vehicle communication without network infrastructure. It has the characteristics that frequent changes of network topology and node density are occurred and messages are disseminated through several relay nodes in the network. Due to frequent change of network topology and node density, however, VANET requires an effective relay node selection scheme to disseminate messages through the multi-hop broadcast. In this paper, we propose a contention window based multi-hop broadcast scheme for VANET. Each node has an optimized contention window and competes with each other for a relay node. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme has a better performance than the distance-based deterministic broadcast scheme in terms of message propagation delay and network traffic.