Efficient Gateway Discovery Algorithms for Delay-Tolerant and Delay-Constrained Data Traffic in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

We focus on the problem of efficient dissemination of available gateways information throughout a Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET). Contrary to previous works, we also consider how the gateway discovery protocol affects user data flows that are routed to the infrastructure network. The cases of both delay-tolerant and delay-constrained user traffic are studied. We propose two schemes targeted at reliable, efficient and timely dissemination of gateway advertisement messages that are suitable for each of the aforementioned traffic types. By means of a thorough and realistic simulation study, we compare our approaches with different configurations of the only multi-hop solution focused on VANET that we found in the literature. Results corroborate that each of our approaches is appropriate for a given traffic type, and that both outperform previous work.