UV-CAST: An Urban Vehicular Broadcast Protocol

Several vehicular communication applications will involve multicast/broadcast communications where all vehicles in a certain region of interest are the intended recipients of particular messages. While there are several existing broadcast routing protocols for highway VANETs, very few solutions exist for urban VANETs in cities like New York City or Chicago. This article attempts to fill this gap by proposing a new broadcast routing protocol, Urban Vehicular BroadCAST (UV-CAST), which addresses both the broadcast storm and disconnected network problems in urban VANETs. Key challenges imposed by urban VANETs as well as new mechanisms needed for meeting these challenges are identified and presented. Performance of the proposed UV-CAST protocol is evaluated in terms of network reachability, received distance, and network overhead in ideal Manhattan Street scenarios as well as in real cities, such as Pittsburgh. The overall performance of UV-CAST is excellent.