Towards provisioning vehicle-based rural information services

Rural areas often lack extensive technological support and usually do not have a high priority in governmental investments due to economic reasons. As the scale of information service provisioning - with data sensing and delivery as primary elements - grows national, there is a matching need to extend these services to rural areas. Smart Vehicular networks present cost-effective, mobile coverage for rural areas. The sensing and buffering resources of vehicles can be utilized in collecting and relaying data. Being delay-tolerant in nature, the data need for some information services, such as environmental monitoring applications, can be sensed by on-vehicle sensors and delivered by vehicles to the collecting destination/sink. In traditional store-carry-and-forward data delivery techniques, a vehicle can continue to carry data even if it is heading away from the destination direction. Such cases may lead to excessive delays and eventual packet dropping. As a part of the vehicular network, road side units (RSUs) are deployed at intersections with no/limited backbone communication at rural areas. By utilizing these RSUs, we propose an infrastructure-assisted data delivery (IADD) scheme that utilizes vehicles headings to enhance delay-tolerant rural information services and improve data delivery ratio and packet delay. Our scheme is evaluated via extensive simulations, carried on NS-2. Our experiments show that IADD achieves significant performance improvements in terms of delivery ratio and delay bounds compared to the traditional store-carry-and-forward technique.