A Store-Carry-Forward-Based Data Transfer Scheme Using Positions and Moving Direction of Vehicles for VANETs

VANET (Vehicular Ad-hoc Network) that is used for vehicular-to-vehicular and vehicular-to-roadside communication is well known as one of the representative application of ad hoc networks. One of the representative mechanisms is Epidemic Routing that adopts the concept of Store-Carry-Forward. However, in Store-Carry-Forward mechanism, each node stores data packets in the buffer, and whenever the node meets at another node, it forwards the duplicated data packets. Therefore, this paper proposes a new reliable data forwarding mechanism that combines Epidemic routing, and the positioning information and moving direction of a node obtained from Global Positioning System (GPS) to reduce widespread forwarded data packets. The proposed scheme forwards data packets using the Store-Carry-Forward mechanism to the neighboring nodes that are determined by the positioning information and moving direction of a node. As a result, we confirmed that the proposed scheme has better performance than Epidemic routing with respect to the total volume of forwarded packets and consumed packet buffer through simulation experiments.