Performance analysis of broadcast protocols in VANETs with Poisson vehicle distribution

In this paper, we propose a general framework for performance analysis of broadcast protocols in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) with vehicles' positions modeled as Poisson points. In fact, in this specific configuration, it can be shown that the positions of a finite number of nodes falling in a finite segment have equally spaced average values. On the basis of this result, it is possible to derive a tractable analytical framework suitable for average (from a topology viewpoint) performance evaluation of a large number of broadcasting algorithms in VANETs. In this work, the proposed analytical framework is applied to the class of probabilistic broadcast multihop protocols with silencing, with focus on a novel polynomial broadcasting algorithm. The validity of the proposed analytical approach is assessed by means of realistic (ns-2) numerical simulations.