A Traffic Resource Diffusion Scheme in Vehicular Networks

In this paper we study a feasible resource diffusion scheme for disseminating queries and reports about real-time traffic conditions in vehicular networks, where both ad-hoc communication and infrastructure communication are available. Each disseminated report represents information about a spatial-temporal event, such as a video clip of a cross traffic or the availability of a parking slot at a particular time. We propose a model in which both queries and reports are disseminated via the ad-hoc communication and when a match occurs the report is returned to the query owner via the infrastructure communication. The excepted system delay is analyzed theoretically and validated by simulations in the STRAW/SWANS simulator. Further applications of our analytical model in resource diffusion strategies are discussed. The proposed analytic model along with the numeric results provides a deep insight into the performance characteristics for VANET with report and query delivery scheme. We expect that this model will become a useful analytic tool not only for VANET but also for future research and development of delay tolerant mobile networks in general.