A Street Broadcast Reduction Scheme (SBR) to Mitigate the Broadcast Storm Problem in VANETs

In urban vehicular wireless environments, several vehicles can send warning messages and so every vehicle within the transmission range will receive the broadcast transmission, possibly rebroadcasting these messages to other vehicles. This increases the number of vehicles receiving the traffic warning messages. Hence, redundancy, contention, and packet collisions due to simultaneous forwarding (usually known as the broadcast storm problem), can occur. In the past, several approaches have been proposed to solve the broadcast storm problem in wireless networks such as Mobile ad hoc Networks MANETs. In this paper, we present Street Broadcast Reduction SBR, a novel scheme that mitigates the broadcast storm problem in VANETs. SBR also reduces the warning message notification time and increases the number of vehicles that are informed about the alert.