An Efficient File Piece Discovery and Information Collection Scheme for VANETs

State of the art research currently aims at utilizing the new wireless capabilities in vehicles to handle road safety threats, relay traffic information, and provide vehicles with a broader sense of their surroundings. Additionally, multimedia and entertainment applications play a vital role in pushing new technologies. They require delivering large pieces of data to the widest possible public using specialized means of delivery. In the meanwhile, the BitTorrent protocol has become widely utilized for large file sharing. However, this protocol requires modifications to allow its use in the highly volatile vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). This paper describes the work done to design algorithms for locating file pieces and gathering information about them. This represents the most challenging step toward applying a BitTorrent-like scheme for VANETs.