Multi-Hop Broadcasting for Gaming over Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

With the advancement of car technology, a wide range of applications, ranging from safety (i.e. alert messages) to entertainment (i.e. games), are becoming more readily available to passengers. Many of these applications use a one-to-many transmission model, in which every car within the Region of Interest (ROI) can broadcast a message to all other cars within a few kilometers of the source. In order to perform a certain game between a group of passengers (players) over VANETs, a game message must be sent to the other players in the car platoon following each game event made by a player in the considered gaming car platoon within the ROI. This requires fast delivery of these messages since we need a mechanism to ensure quick delivery of these messages. Therefore, fast multi-hop message propagation was adopted over VANETs in a highway scenario in which there can be reduced delay of propagation messages by reducing the number of hops by selecting a specific node as a forwarder and based on having different contention windows among vehicles. The proposed algorithm is called Smart Inter-Vehicle Communication Schema (S_IVCS) and three approaches have been suggested: FIXED_300, FIXED_1000, and RANDOMALY approaches are evaluated with the S_IVCS approach in swiftly forwarding the messages to each vehicle expressing interest for infotainment to evaluate the ability of the proposed system while increasing the coverage radius. In addition, S_IVCS proves good performance compared to other approaches with respect to transmission time and number of hops. Also, the impact on the performance of S_IVCS with respect to the duration of time slots. The simulation has been performed using the Network Simulator (NS-2).