Coupling LTE and network coding for efficient dissemination in vehicular networks

Vehicular networks face many issues when trying to disseminate information, mainly channel overloading due to uneven vehicles´ density and multiple retransmissions of the same message. A key solution to this problem is network coding. Indeed, network coding solves this overloading problem by smartly broadcasting useful information, as this technique is meant to optimize the amount of information transmitted on the network. We investigated the usage of network coding in a hybrid architecture: we considered vehicular (V2V and V2I) and cellular communications (we used LTE in this work). Our goal is to provide an optimal way to disseminate a given information in a given notification area by exploiting network complementarity and network coding. The utilization of the existing cellular network to broadcast information to a large area, coupled with the utilization of vehicular communications to locally disseminate information, allows network coding to deliver information to the right geographical area very efficiently and at very low cost. This proposed framework is well suited to Points-of-Interest- and location-based applications, and we demonstrate that our solution, named VaNetworkCoding, induces significant improvements in the global usage of vehicular and LTE networks.