Utility-based forwarder selection for content dissemination in vehicular networks

Recent work has shown that content dissemination protocols in vehicular networks can achieve throughput and fan-out delay optimization by either simple network flooding or destination-driven dissemination. While those content dissemination schemes work well, they require all nodes in the network to forward every data packet, which has inherent inefficiencies for non-flooding traffic patterns, where not all nodes need to receive the data. Hence, they support adequately safety applications, being not efficient for non-safety applications, whereby the flow of information is interest-driven rather than destination-driven, e.g. restaurant recommendation and sale advertisement. In this work, the concept of “useful” forwarder is formalized aiming at maximizing content utility for end users. Further, it presents I-SEND, a forwarder selection approach, which enables nodes to choose the most appropriate forwarders. Incorporating I-SEND on trace-driven and synthetic simulation scenarios can produce higher content utility than other concurrent schemes.