Minimum Broadcasting Structure for Optimal Data Dissemination in Vehicular Networks

In this paper, we model a vehicular multihop network as an evolving graph and formulate the problem of optimal data dissemination over the network in terms of minimum number of transmissions. We show that the problem belongs to the NP complexity class and provide an easy to implement polynomial-time 2 τH(Δ)-approximation algorithm, where τ is the number of different subgraphs that comprise the evolving graph, and H(Δ) is the harmonic number of the degree of the evolving graph. By means of applying our heuristic over a vehicular scenario generated by a microscopic road-traffic simulator, we provide some insight into the data dissemination issue. In addition, the proposed algorithm is employed to benchmark a state-of-the-art communication protocol. We hope this paper will inspire more efficient heuristics and data dissemination solutions.