A robust distance-based relay selection for message dissemination in vehicular network

The relay-node selection plays a decisive impact on the message dissemination in vehicular network. However, in some scenarios, due to lack of the reliable and stable relay-node selection, the message dissemination suffers from an intolerable delay, even a failure. In this paper, we focus on a design of the robust relay selection, which aims at (1) achieving a maximum message dissemination speed in general scenarios, and (2) assuring an acceptable dissemination speed in the adverse scenario. Two adverse scenarios are first introduced for the message dissemination when the distance-based relay selection is applied in multi-hop broadcast. To tackle the challenge, we propose a robust distance-based relay selection by optimizing the exponent-based partitioning broadcast protocol (our previous work) and incorporating a proposed mini-black-burst-assisted mechanism. Moreover, we develop analytic models for the robust approach performances in terms of contention latency and packet delivery ratio (PDR). Simulations are used to verify these analytic models, demonstrate the acceptable performances of the proposal in adverse scenarios, and compare it with the state-of-the-art approaches in general scenarios. Results show an increase of more than 11.01% in terms of message dissemination speed independent of vehicle density and a stable PDR of more than 99.99%.