VVID: A delay tolerant data dissemination architecture for VANETs using V2V and V2I communication

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) have a highly dynamic network topology due to the constant and rapid movement of vehicles. Therefore, communication in VANETs is mostly affected with disruptions and delays as a result of network disconnections and partitions. Moreover, increasing the geographical coverage area for data dissemination while keeping the data-delivery delay low is a challenge. This paper first surveys the routing techniques in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), and also the usage of DTN communication in VANETs. Then, the paper proposes a combined architecture of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication, DTN communication, and Vehicle-to- Infrastructure (V2I) communication as a large- scale data dissemination system for vehicular networks. We argue that the combined architecture enables data dissemination in a larger geographical area compared to a V2V communication model, and efficiently deals with disconnectivity and network partitions that mostly occurs in sparse networks.