How to disseminate vehicular data efficiently in both highway and urban environments?

Vehicular networks are a class of mobile networks in which vehicles are equipped with radio interfaces and are therefore able to communicate with an infrastructure (if existing) or other vehicles in an opportunistic way. Information dissemination enjoys wide applicability in these types of networks, ranging from traffic information and warnings, to parking availability, fuel prices, road conditions, and advertisements. Hence, we propose an efficient dissemination protocol: ROD (Road Oriented Dissemination) that consists in two modules: (i) Optimized Distance Defer Transfer module, and (ii) Store and Forward module. This protocol permits to increase the delivery ratio and optimize the bandwidth use by limiting the number of vehicles having to relay each packet. The protocol has been implemented and tested on the roads. In this paper we report its performance studies, performed by means of simulations, and we compare them to other dissemination protocols results. Performance study shows interesting results of ROD compared to existing solutions.