Car-to-car safety applications that demand realtime and reliable communications in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) requires a new paradigm of coding techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel coding approach using a systematic Raptor code for car-to-car postcrash warning broadcast applications. A cross-layer simulator model is developed to evaluate the performance of Raptor codes against repetition codes using also multiple antennas spatial diversity techniques. The end-to-end delay and

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... cket delivery ratio are used as performance metrics to demonstrate the latency and reliability problems of repetition codes that are addressed using Raptor codes.