An adaptive vehicular epidemic routing method based on attractor selection model

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is an emerging technology that can support many vehicular safety and comfort applications through intervehicle communications. However, VANETs could face a great challenge arising from rapidly varying network topology. It is an essential issue to design an efficient and reliable solution for message dissemination in dynamic VANETs. In this paper, we propose an epidemic routing method with capability of self-adapting to the highly dynamic nature of VANETs. To ensure a good trade-off between reachability and efficiency of message dissemination, an adaptive probabilistic infection and an adaptive limited-time forwarding mechanisms are also proposed for the epidemic broadcasting. Moreover, inspired by the self-adaptability and robustness of the cellular gene regulatory networks, we use the attractor selection mechanism to enhance routing messages in dynamic VANETs. Through comparative simulations under different traffic scenarios, we validate our proposed method and prove that it can guarantee message reachability and achieve high delivery efficiency in terms of message delivery ratio, average routing latency and cost.