Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a wireless emerging technology that aims to provide safety and communication services to drivers and passengers. In VANETs, vehicles communicate with other vehicles directly or through road side units (RSU) for sharing traffic information. The data dissemination in VANETs is a challenging issue as the vehicles have to share safety critical information in real time. The data distribution is usually done using broadcast method resulting in inefficient use of

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... work resources. Therefore, to avoid the broadcast storm and efficiently use network resources, next forwarder vehicle (NFV) is selected to forward data to nearby vehicles. The NFV selection is based on certain parameters like direction, distance, and position of vehicles, which makes it a multicriteria decision problem. In this paper, analytical network process (ANP) is used as a multicriteria decision tool to select the optimal vehicle as NFV. The stability of alternatives (candidate vehicles for NFV selection) ranking is checked using sensitivity analysis for different scenarios. Mathematical formulation shows that ANP method is applicable for NFV selection in VANETs. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms other state-of-the-art data dissemination schemes in terms of reachability, latency, collisions, and number of transmitted and duplicate data packets.