Repetition-based cooperative broadcasting for vehicular ad-hoc networks

In vehicular ad hoc networks, most of critical applications involved with safety rely on reliable broadcast communications with low latency. Recently, repetition-based protocols have been proposed to meet the requirements of timeliness and reliability for broadcasting. In these protocols, a sender repeatedly retransmits the broadcast message during the lifetime of the message. However, existing protocols face serious problems such as deterioration of the signal quality caused by wireless fading. In particular, since excessive repetitions might cause network congestion and waste channel resources, reliability of broadcasting should be achieved with as small a number of repetitions as possible. In this paper, we therefore propose a novel repetition-based broadcast protocol which exploits a cooperative diversity technique (called RB-CD) making a small number of repetitions robust for wireless fading. To support this cooperative diversity, neighboring nodes transmit the same message almost simultaneously (that is, using the same repetition pattern for each other) in order to form a virtual antenna array. The virtual antenna array achieves a diversity gain at the receivers. In the RB-CD protocol, the virtual antenna array consists of the source and some of its neighbors (called relays) which participate in repeating the transmission of a broadcast message. In addition, a new distributed relay selection algorithm is introduced in the RB-CD protocol. From the ns-2 simulation results, we verified that RB-CD provides a more reliable broadcasting service due to its capability of exploiting cooperative diversity.