Performance Modeling of Data Dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) have become a cornerstone component of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). VANET applications present a huge potential for improving road safety and travel comfort, hence the growing interest of both academia and industry. The main advantage of VANETs is its ad hoc nature which does not require fixed infrastructure or centralized administration. However, designing scalable information dissemination techniques for VANET applications remains a challenging task due to the inherent nature of such highly dynamic environments. Existing dissemination techniques often resort to simulation for performance evaluation and there are only few studies that offer mathematical modeling. In this paper we provide a comparative study of existing performance modeling approaches for data dissemination techniques designed for different VANET applications.