Road safety applications envisaged for VANETs depend largely on the exchange of messages to deliver information to the concerned vehicles. In the last years, several dissemination protocols have been presented in the literature. In this paper we study and evaluate the dissemination of emergency messages in realistic vehicular scenarios. In the evaluation, some protocols are examined from two perspectives: qualitative and quantitative. We identify the principal mechanisms of dissemination and examine the factors that most impact on the simulation results. In addition, we investigate the effects of the shadows of buildings and other vehicles in the performance of the dissemination protocols. The simulation results suggest the need to include scenarios with fixed and mobile obstacles to increase the credibility of the performance of the evaluated protocols.

Peer Reviewed