The analytic hierarchy process-based optimal forwarder selection in multi-hop broadcasting scheme for vehicular safety

Vehicular technologies have been recently introduced to highway safety applications and caught much attention of governments and management authorities. The vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) uses cars as mobile nodes to form a mobile network. VANET offers potential and promising technical solutions to vehicular safety. Multi-hop broadcasting schemes are particularly preferred methods to transmit time-sensitive safety warning information to potentially influenced vehicles. However, broadcasting may lead to frequent contention and serious collision, thus causing broadcast storms. In order to alleviate broadcast storm and promptly disseminate safety warnings, the paper proposes an optimal forwarder selection scheme to minimize the number of rebroadcasting nodes and guarantee fast and efficient safety warning information dissemination. The proposed forwarder selection scheme is based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The criteria include inter-vehicular lateral and longitudinal distances, vehicular communication ranges, and vehicles covered within the communication range of previous forwarder vehicles. The AHP-based forwarder selection model is established and model's validity is verified mathematically in this paper.