Context-driven disruption tolerant networking for vehicular applications

In this paper, we describe how a context-driven disruption tolerant network may be utilized for vehicular applications. The key concept involves utilizing contextual information pertaining to space and time settings of applications to drive networking functions. As a result, the performance characteristics may be better attuned to the time-scale of relevant vehicular applications. We discuss the protocol highlights and present a compact grid-based method for performance evaluation of such systems. Novel metrics such as information freshness demonstrate the discrete nature of information dissemination. Additionally, we observe that asymptotic evaluation of metrics such as packet delivery ratio do not provide a realistic picture of application performance. As a consequence, the time-scale of interest for the applications becomes crucial.