Performance modeling and analysis of emergency message propagation in vehicular ad hoc networks

Reliability and timeliness are two critical requirements of vehicle safety-related communication services in VANETs. In this paper, we develop an analytical model to analyze the packet reception rate and end-to-end delay of emergency message delivery operation in a VANET environment when multihop broadcast communications are used. The model is applied to derive closed-form expressions of the end-to-end delay of two popular multihop message propagation methods, that is, the farthest-distance method and the counter-based method. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the correctness of the theoretic results and compare the performance of the two message propagation methods. Observations are provided for the design of efficient and robust emergency message propagation methods for vehicular wireless communication networks.