Collaborative data transmission in vehicular ad-hoc networks

Mobile users may want to access Internet services even in moving vehicles. A vehicular ad-hoc network provides a platform that allows a vehicle to connect to a roadside unit and then to the Internet. The connection time to a roadside unit may be short due to the fast moving of a vehicle. In this paper, a collaborative communication model is applied to extend this connection time. Moving vehicles and parking vehicles are separately grouped together. A moving vehicle can cooperate with other moving vehicles in the same group to transmit data to a group of parking vehicles which in turn forward data to the roadside unit. A simple performance analysis shows that this group-to-group communication achieves higher data throughput than one-to-one communication.