Reliable broadcasting in vehicular ad-hoc networks is challenging due to their unique characteristics including intermittent connectivity and various vehicular scenarios. Applications and services in intelligent transportation systems need an efficient, fast and reliable broadcasting protocol especially for safety and emergency applications. In our previous work, we have proposed DECA, a new reliable broadcasting protocol which suits such characteristics. To address the issue of various vehicular scenarios, our protocol performs beaconing to gather local density information of 1-hop neighbors and uses such information to adapt its broadcasting decision dynamically. Specifically, before broadcasting a message, a node selects a neighbor with the highest density and adds the selected neighbor's identifier to the message. Upon receiving of a broadcast message, each node checks whether or not it is the selected neighbor. If so, it is responsible for rebroadcasting the message immediately. This mechanism can raise the data dissemination speed of our protocol so that it is as fast as simple flooding. To address the issue of intermittent connectivity, identifiers of broadcast messages are added into beacons. This helps nodes to check if there are any broadcast messages that have not yet been received. In this paper, we propose DECA with a new beaconing algorithm and a new waiting timeout calculation, so-called DECA-bewa. Our new protocol can reduce redundant retransmissions and overall overhead in high density areas. The protocol performance is evaluated on the network simulator (NS-2). Simulation results show that DECA-bewa outperforms existing protocols in terms of reliability, overhead and speed of data dissemination.

We propose a new end-to-end transport protocol called Multi-path Transmission Control Protocol (M/TCP) and its two robust acknowledgement (ACK) schemes. Our protocol is designed as an alternative TCP option to improve reliability and performance of the Internet. The M/TCP sender simultaneously transmits data via multiple controlled paths to the receiver. Our protocol requires no modification in IP layer. Two M/TCP endpoints establish multiple paths between them by subscribing to multiple ISPs. The two robust ACK schemes proposed in this paper aim at improving M/TCP performance over the Internet with high packet loss in ACK channels. Performances between our protocol and TCP Reno are compared in terms of throughput and fairness by using ns2 simulator. Simulation results indicate that M/TCP achieves higher throughput than TCP Reno in situation of random drop and burst traffic with small buffer size. When there is network congestion on reverse path, M/TCP with the proposed robust ACK schemes performs better than M/TCP with the conventional immediate ACK scheme.

We have proposed Rate-based Multi-path Transmission Control Protocol (R-M/TCP) for improving reliability and performance of data transfer over the Internet by using multiple paths. Congestion control in R-M/TCP is performed in a rate-based and loss-avoidance manner. It attempts to estimate the available bandwidth and the queue length of the used routes in order to fully utilize the bandwidth resources. However, it has been reported that when the used routes' characteristics, i.e. available bandwidth and delay, are much different, R-M/TCP cannot achieve the desired throughput from the routes. This is because R-M/TCP originally transmits data packets in a round-robin manner through the routes. In this paper, therefore, we propose R-M/TCP using Packet Scheduling Algorithm (PSA). Instead of using the round-robin manner, R-M/TCP utilizes PSA that accounts for time-varying bandwidth and delay of each path so that number of data packets arriving in out-of-order at the receiver can be minimized and the desired throughput can be achieved. Quantitative simulations are conducted to show effectiveness of R-M/TCP using PSA.