ACK-CAST: ACK-Based Broadcast Protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In vehicular ad hoc networks, the efficient and reliable dissemination of emergency messages in a highly mobile environment under dense or sparse network is a significant challenge. This paper proposes a new vehicular broadcast protocol, called ACK-CAST, that can operate effectively in both dense and sparse network scenarios. ACK-CAST relies on acknowledgment messages from one-hop neighbors to select the next rebroadcasting vehicle. Simulation results show that ACK-CAST outperforms the SERVUS protocol in terms of the end-to-end delay, message delivery ratio and network overhead.