The main objective of Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is to make road transportation systems more intelligent in order to anticipate and avoid dangerous, potentially life-threatening situations. Due to its promising safety applications, this type of network has attracted a lot of attention in the research community. The dissemination of warning messages, such as DENMs (Decentralized Environmental Notification Messages), requirse an efficient and robust routing protocol. In previous studies, the active signaling mechanism has shown its ability to prevent collisions between users trying to allocate the same resource. In this paper, we propose an original message forwarding strategy based on the active signaling mechanism. Our proposal disseminates warning messages from a source vehicle to the rest of the network while minimizing the access delay and the number of relay nodes. For this purpose, a special time slot is dedicated to forwarding emergency warning messages. To avoid access collisions on this slot, the active signaling scheme we propose favours the selection of the furthest node as the forwarder. We carry out a number of simulations and comparisons to evaluate the performances of the scheme.