The feasibility of information dissemination in vehicular ad-hoc networks

In this paper we consider information dissemination in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) in city scenarios. Information dissemination is an important building block of many proposed VANET applications. These applications need a certain dissemination performance to work satisfactorily. This is critical during the rollout of VANETs, when only few cars participate. After analytical considerations, we focus on simulations using a detailed model of a whole city. We assess the dissemination performance depending on the amount of equipped vehicles on the road. For few equipped vehicles, we show that dissemination speed and coverage will not be sufficient. Therefore, we propose to use specialized, but simple and cheap infrastructure, stationary supporting units (SSUs). If a small number of SSUs is installed in a city and connected via some backbone network, the dissemination performance improves dramatically, especially during the VANET rollout phase. Thus, SSUs allow for a faster and earlier rollout of working, dissemination-based VANET applications