Throughput capacity of VANETs by exploiting mobility diversity

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), improving uploading efficiency is crucial to enabling the copious applications such as reporting sensed data for traffic management or environment monitoring. Depending on the applications, the contents to be uploaded can be of large volumes. Therefore, there exist the fundamental demands of the delivery with high throughput. In this paper, we derive the achievable throughput capacity scaling law for such applications in VANETs as Θ(1/log n), with the number of road-side units scaling as Θ(n/log n). Furthermore, by exploring the mobility diversity among vehicles, we propose a novel two-hop forwarding scheme to improve the throughput performance approaching the throughput capacity. Specifically, the source vehicle distributes the contents to multiple relay vehicles with the largest mobility diversity so that the number of concurrent transmissions can be increased. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed transmission scheme in terms of the increased throughput performance.