Bulk Data Transfer through VANET Infrastructure

Content distribution over ad-hoc networks has been widely studied and numerous solutions can be adapted to VANETs (vehicular networks). VANETs, however, can also benefit from an infrastructure in order to improve the efficiency of any content dissemination technique, while allowing more transmissions resources to be available for safety applications. Unfortunately, so far, no such solution has been proposed. In this paper, we introduce the use of an 802.11p infrastructure based on Road Side Units (RSU) for downloading data (eg a map) to vehicles on a highway. At the application level, the main challenge is then how to deliver data to a large number of moving receivers with limited connectivity. While broadcasting data through each RSU should efficiently provide the cars with most of the data, one could believe that some specific transmissions based on vehicles needs could help to reach full downloads. Using simulations, we observed however that the best performances are achieved by a pure broadcasting system.