Data dissemination in VANETs: A scheduling approach

Data dissemination is a promising application for the vehicular network. Existing data dissemination schemes are generally built upon some random-access protocol, which results in the unavoidable collision problem. To address this problem, in this paper we design a novel data dissemination strategy from the scheduling perspective. A data dissemination scheduling framework is then proposed. In the proposed framework, the main challenge is how best to assign the transmission opportunity to nodes with maximum dissemination utility and to avoid the collision problem. We then propose a novel and practical relay selection strategy and adopt the space-time network coding (STNC) with low detection complexity and space-time diversity gain to improve the dissemination efficiency. Compared with the random-access dissemination such as CodeOn-Basic and the noncooperative transmission, our proposed data dissemination strategy performs better in terms of the dissemination delay. In addition, the proposed strategy works even better in the dense network than the sparse scenario, benefitting from the space-time diversity gain of STNC and no-collision transmissions. This is in sharp contrary to the CodeOn-Basic method.