A Scalable Time-Division-Based Emergency Messages Broadcast Scheme for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles in Urban Environment

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) technology promises to revolutionize the transportation sector by solving many safety and traffic efficiency challenges while significantly enhancing passengers' and drivers' comfort. Most of these applications are built upon multi-hop broadcast of information among vehicles, leading to an increased contention and thus higher collision probability due to the limited bandwidth available for vehicular communications. In this paper, we propose a novel Time-Division-based Broadcast (TDB) scheme to mitigate interferences originating from hidden nodes (i.e., vehicles) to meet the stringent safety applications requirements. Then, we use this broadcast scheme as a basis for designing a new efficient and scalable protocol for emergency messages dissemination in urban vehicular networks (UV-TDB: an Urban, Vehicular and Time-Division-based Broadcast protocol). The simulation experiments show that UV-TDB significantly improves the performance of multi-hop broadcast and outperforms two state of the art protocols in terms of the achieved reduction in broadcast overhead (up to 77.9%), packet collisions ratio (up to 93.5%), interference rate (up to 43.5%) and increase in message reception rate (up to 337.7%). The results highlight also that UV-TDB adapts better to varying levels of vehicle density, making it more scalable.