Adaptive Probabilistic Flooding for Information Hovering in VANETs

Abstract

Information hovering is an information dissemination concept over a mobile set of peers which has not been investigated to the extent that other information dissemination paradigms have. It naturally appears in many vehicular network applications where information must be made available to vehicles within a confined geographical area for during some time period. One elementary strategy is to flood the area with data. Even in this case, some vehicles may never receive the content due to potential partitions created by low traffic density. In order to address this issue, in this work we propose a strategy based on epidemic routing in the hovering area, and probabilistic flooding outside it. Vehicles outside the hovering area serve as bridges towards partitions, leading to high reachability. We highlight the adaptive feature of the protocol, where the rebroadcast probability in partitions is adaptively regulated based on estimates of the density of vehicles in the hovering area. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated in VISSIM, using as the reference model in all simulation experiments a section of the road network in cities of Washington. The proposed protocol is shown to achieve the set design goals.

Special Issue: Advances in Vehicular Networks

“…In [4], the concept of information hovering for data dissemination over a mobile set of peers is addressed to make the given information available to all vehicles within a confined geographical area in a specific time period. The paper proposes a strategy based on epidemic routing in the hovering area, and probabilistic flooding outside it to avoid some vehicles never receiving the content dedicated to them due to eventual partitions and disconnected areas created by low traffic density.…”

Analysis of probabilistic information dissemination in wireless networks employing algebraic graph theory elements

“…Probabilistic flooding is also considered as a suitable alternative to blind flooding in the area of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET). Xeros et al [114], propose a scheme which is based on the application of epidemic routing within the hovering area and probabilistic flooding outside the hovering area. Vehicles outside the hovering area that receive the information message serve as bridges for the partitioned uninformed areas resulting in high network coverage.…”