  Local vehicle density estimation is increasingly becoming an essential factor
of many vehicular ad-hoc network applications such as congestion control and
traffic state estimation. This estimation is used to get an approximate number
of neighbors within the transmission range since beacons do not give accurate
accuracy about neighborhood. These is due to the special characteristics of
VANETs such as high mobility, high density variation. To enhance the
performance of these applications, an accurate estimation of the local density
with minimum of overhead is needed. Most of the proposed strategies address the
global traffic density estimation without a big attention on the local density
estimation. This paper proposes an improved approach for local density
estimation in VANETs in terms of accuracy and overhead. The simulation results
showed that our strategy allows an interesting precision of estimation with
acceptable overhead.
