On the effects of mobility for efficient broadcast data dissemination in I2V networks

In this paper, we consider the problem of disseminating data in Infrastructure-to-Vehicular (I2V) networks. In particular, given a fixed Road Side Unit (RSU) we evaluate the maximum amount of data that can be reliably transferred from the RSU to the vehicles passing in its proximity through a recently proposed multihop probabilistic broadcasting protocol, namely Irresponsible Forwarding (IF). In particular, referring to highway-like Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs), we first characterize a mobile scenario in such a way to make a direct comparison with a static scenario meaningful, taking into account a physical characterization of the network (e.g., in terms of vehicle spatial density). Then, we carry out a comparative investigation considering mobile and static IEEE 802.11 networking scenarios. Our results show that from a single packet perspective, the vehicles´ mobility does not affect the behavior of the IF protocol, at least in the considered highway scenarios. However, different conclusions are reached when an information flow (i.e., a series of consecutive packets) is considered. In this context, we determine the maximum amount of data that can be transferred from the RSU to the mobile vehicles passing through a certain region of interest around the RSU.