Fast Multi-hop Broadcast over Vehicular Networks: A Real Testbed Evaluation

As the technology available on cars is increasing, a wide range of applications, from safety to entertainment, are becoming available for this scenario. Many of these applications involve interactive multi-hop broadcast of messages over a certain area-of-interest. To this aim, specific solutions have been proposed to deal with the high mobility and density of a vehicular network scenario. In particular, we developed a simple, yet effective, solution for allowing cars to estimate their communication range through including few parameters in exchanged application messages. Then, this range estimation is exploited to reduce the number of hops and the delay required by a broadcast message to reach all the vehicles in the area-of-interest. Since so far the evaluation of our solution has been focused on simulations, we have now created a real testbed. Here, we report on results achieved through this real testbed, showing that they confirm the efficacy of our solution in estimating vehicles’ transmission range and choosing the most appropriate forwarder for transmitted messages.