Abstract
In this paper, we propose a multihop broadcast protocol for dissemination of time-critical emergency messages (EMs) in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), where the IEEE 802.11p technology is used for communication among the nodes. The proposed trinary partitioned black-burst-based broadcast protocol (3P3B) consists of two primary mechanisms. First, a mini distributed interframe space (DIFS) in a medium access control (MAC) sublayer is introduced to give the time-critical EMs a higher access priority to the communication channel compared with other messages. Second, a trinary partitioning is designed to iteratively partition the communication range into small sectors. The trinary partitioning mechanism allows the farthest possible vehicle in the farthest sector from the sender node to perform forwarding to increase the dissemination speed by reducing the number of forwarding hops. In addition, 3P3B reduces the contention period jitter, which is independent of the density of vehicles, resulting in a more stable contention period. Analytical models are proposed for performance evaluation in conjunction with simulation-based performance analysis. The results demonstrate that 3P3B outperforms benchmarks of the existing broadcast protocols in VANETs in terms of the average message dissemination speed, message progress, communication delay, and packet delivery ratio.