Message scheduling and delivery with vehicular communication network infrastructure

Wide deployment of communication devices on vehicles is on the horizon due to the development of intelligent transportation systems. Although these communication devices are originally designed for highway efficiency and safety applications, the mobile communication ability on vehicles also enables a lot of other emerging applications. In this paper we study an application scenario on utilizing vehicles to carry messages for a set of sensor collectors, which are deployed at places without other communication infrastructure. A core problem that we study is on how to schedule messages so that the message delay is minimized. To achieve this goal, we propose three different strategies: the first feasible vehicle strategy, the optimal bound strategy, and the multiple attempt strategy. We further provide mathematical analysis on these strategies that are also verified by simulations, and compare the performance of these three strategies in simulations.We draw the conclusion that the optimal bound strategy is an effective strategy as it achieves low delay of the messages. At the same time it avoids the disadvantages such as high energy consumption and large storage size as in the multiple attempt strategy.