Abstract
Emergency Message (EM) dissemination in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) has attracted significant attention in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) in recent years. Such dissemination mechanisms mostly rely on licensed Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) systems such as IEEE 802.11p and IEEE P1609.1-4 standards. By timely broadcasting of emergency messages (EMs), drivers can avoid potentially dangerous accidents and experience a safer driving environment. As the result, a concern of the number of accidents is also reduced. Thus, an efficient broadcast protocol is required in this scenario. In this thesis, designs of robust broadcast protocols are considered for Emergency Message Dissemination in VANETs. It presents four innovative contributions. Firstly, a literature review as well as challenges and issues of the protocols designed for EM dissemination application are presented. Secondly, Priority-based Routing Protocol (PRP) and its reliability enhancement (PRP-RE) have been proposed as broadcast protocols for different types of EM disseminations, providing; 1) fully distributed broadcast protocol; 2) different Quality of Services (QoS) for different types of EMs; 3) maximum message dissemination distance per hop; and 4) high communication reliability. Thirdly, a more efficient and robust multi-hop broadcast protocol for time-critical EM disseminations is proposed as Trinary Partitioned Black-Burst based Broadcast Protocol (3P3B). A mini-DIFS in MAC sub-layer is introduced to give the time-critical EMs the highest priority access to the communication channel compared to other EMs. In addition, a trinary partitioning is designed to iteratively partition the communication area into small sectors, allowing only the furthest possible vehicle to perform EM forwarding. Therefore, 3P3B can increase dissemination speed and reduce contention period jitter. The performance evaluation results demonstrate that 3P3B outperforms benchmarks of the existing broadcast protocols in VANETs in terms of average message dissemination speed, message progress, communication delay, and packet delivery ratio. Finally, 3P3B-DTN is proposed based on an enhancement of 3P3B to deal with communications in a disruptive network with an introduction of EM store, carry, and forward to maximize packet delivery ratio while minimizing end-to-end delay. The performance evaluation results show that 3P3B-DTN achieves higher packet delivery ratio than 3P3B even when the network is disrupted with a trade-off of higher end-to-end delay and overhead for those EMs, which would be lost otherwise.