Comfort Applications in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks Based on Fountain Coding

Data communication in Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) tends to be an important challenge mainly due to intermittent connectivity and MAC layer collisions. Such issues hinder reliable and in-order reception of data packets and hence lead to poor performance of some applications like file transferring. In this paper we propose a file exchange scheme based on Fountain coding aiming at improving throughput of the network. In the proposed approach there is no need of in-order reception of packets, thus, vehicles can make benefit of opportunistic delivery of data. As a result we use UDP in contrast to classical use of TCP while reliability is still preserved. Results of extensive simulations show that the proposed approach increases the number of successful file exchanges as well as the average throughput of each vehicle. It also facilitate resumable downloads. Therefore it can be a good candidate for comfort applications in VANETs which mainly rely on file (or any sort of bulk data) exchange.