Delay-Aware Data Delivery in Vehicular Intermittently Connected Networks

The open literature encloses numerous studies on the efficiency of retransmission mechanisms used in typical data communication networks for the purpose of recovering from packet transmission errors or losses. This paper revolves around the design and analysis of a Delay-Aware Data Delivery (DADD) scheme for Vehicular Intermittently Connected Networks (VICNs). At the heart of DADD is a novel mechanism that allows a source stationary roadside unit (SRU) to carry out necessary bundle retransmissions to high speed vehicles newly entering its communication range. In turn, these vehicles will guarantee delay-minimal delivery of the retransmitted bundles to the destination SRU. A mathematical model is developed to characterize the operation of the source SRU under DADD as well as to evaluate the resulting bundle delivery delay. To verify the validity and the accuracy of the proposed model, extensive simulations are conducted where the performance of DADD is compared to that of two other existing schemes. Results show that DADD outperforms these two schemes by 14.28% to 36.84%.