Broadcasting In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Traffic congestion and accidents continue to take a toll on our society with congestion causing billions of dollars in economic costs and millions of traffic accidents annually worldwide. For many years now, transportation planners have been pursuing an aggressive agenda to increase road safety through Intelligent Transportation System initiatives. Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) based information systems have considerable promise for improving traffic safety, reducing congestion and increasing environmental efficiency of transportation systems. To achieve the future road safety vision, time-sensitive, safety-critical applications in vehicular communication networks are necessary. However, there are numerous technical hurdles for deploying VANET on the road network and its full potential will not be realized until the issues related to communication reliability, delay and security are solved.

VANET is a specific type of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) with unique characteristics that are different from a general MANET. These attributes include the traffic conditions (network density), mobility model (vehicle movements) and the network topology (road layout) imposed by the underlying transportation system. In this dissertation, we studybroadcasting for VANETs that are applicable to many traffic safety applications. We investigate ways to improve reliability and reduce delay under numerous traffic conditions (free flow and congested flow traffic scenarios). Further, we incorporate vehicular traffic information to increase communication efficiency in dynamic vehicular networks. We believe that the contributions in this dissertation will be of interest to both the computer networking and transportation research communities.