Delay efficient cooperation in public safety vehicular networks using LTE and IEEE 802.11p

Cooperative schemes for critical content distribution over vehicular networks are presented and analyzed. The first scheme is based on unicasting from the base station, whereas the second is based on threshold based multicasting. Long Term Evolution (LTE) is used for long range communications with the base station (BS) and 802.11p is considered for inter-vehicle collaboration on the short range. A high mobility environment with correlated shadowing is adopted. Both schemes are shown to outperform non-cooperative unicasting and multicasting, respectively, when the appropriate 802.11p power class is used. The first scheme achieves the best performance among the compared methods, and a practical approximation of that scheme is shown to be close to optimal performance.