Vehicular Ad hoc networks (VANET) are a key element of cooperative intelligent transport systems. One of the challenges in VANETs is dealing with awareness and congestion due to the high amount of messages received from the vehicles in communication range. As VANETs are used in critical applications, congestion on the receiver side caused by the buffering of the packets is a safety hazard. In this paper, we propose a streamwise queuing system on the receiver side and show how it improves the timeliness of the messages received and maintains the awareness of the system in a congestion situation. © Copyright 2017 IEEE