Reliable Broadcast Transmission in Vehicular Networks Based on Fountain Codes

Car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communications are currently under intense research as they enable a wide variety of applications. Besides security-driven applications which require only small amounts of individual data there are also applications which require medium to high amounts of uniform data delivered to an unknown number of nodes. For this kind of broadcast and multicast applications, the use of fountain codes is highly suitable. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of fountain codes in an infrastructure-based automotive communication system and introduce an expedient method to design a system deploying IEEE 802.11p and fountain codes. By means of simulation results obtained for three representative vehicular scenarios we compare the performance of our method to an alternative method also applied in this field, i.e. the data carousel. For specific configurations the system based on fountain codes outperforms the conservative approach by a factor of four in terms of the overall throughput and thus provides the potential to significantly increase the overall efficiency.