Opportunistic spatio-temporal dissemination system for vehicular networks

Opportunistic dissemination protocols have potentially applications in the domain of vehicular networking, ranging from advertising to emergency/traffic/parking information spreading: one of the characteristics of vehicular networks is that they are often partitioned due to lack of continuity in connectivity among cars or limited coverage of infostations in remote areas. Most available opportunistic, or delay tolerant, networking protocols, however, fail to take into account the peculiarities of vehicular networks. This paper introduces a novel opportunistic event dissemination protocol for vehicular networks. The protocol takes into account the characteristics of these networks in order to dispatch the publications to the subscribers. Furthermore, it uses opportunistic cache and replay mechanisms to deliver the notifications to new subscribers in the area throughout the publication interval. We evaluate our approach through simulation using realistic vehicular traces. We compare our algorithm with a standard epidemic protocol, which offer the best alternative in terms of message delivery, by measuring overhead and delivery over a number of scenarios.