A Novel Trace-Aided Data Dissemination Algorithm in Vehicular Networks

The inter-contact time is one of important factors affecting the performance of vehicular network protocols. To overcome the problem that the too long time interval of any two fixed nodes to contact in a wide range, an aggregated statistics of inter-contacts based data dissemination algorithm was proposed in VANETs (Vehicular Ad-hoc Network). Firstly, the aggregated intervals distribution was proved to be regular. Then a second-order Markov chain based on the historical trace was used to predict the next interval. According to the aggregated intervals and the intervals between fixed nodes, it determined which node would be the next hop. Finally, Qual Net simulation platform was selected to evaluate the performance of this protocol. Compared with Epidemic protocol and the protocol only considering the interval of two fixed vehicles, the proposed protocol shows a relatively stable performance in delivery ratio and average end-to-end delay. Especially in the area with sparse nodes, the end-to-end delay is far superior to other protocols.