Information Hovering in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Information Hovering is a relatively new concept of information dissemination over a mobile set of peers. It naturally applies in many applications in vehicular ad-hoc networks, where useful information needs to be made available to all vehicles within a confined geographical area for a specific time interval. A straightforward approach, is to have all vehicles within the hovering area exchange messages with each other. However, this method does not guarantee that all vehicles within the hovering area will receive the message due to potential partitioning of the network in areas with low traffic density and/or low market penetration rate. In this work, we address the problem by applying probabilistic flooding schemes outside the hovering area. Informed vehicles outside the hovering area can serve as information bridges towards partitioned uninformed areas thus leading to high reachability. We consider a number of rebroadcast probability functions and we evaluate their performance using the microscopic simulation tool VISSIM. Our reference model represents a section of the road network in the cities of Bellevue and Redmond in Washington. The obtained results indicate that probabilistic flooding with a Gaussian like probability function outperforms other approaches by achieving high reachability values and a relatively small number of exchanged messages.