DOVE: Data Dissemination to a Desired Number of Receivers in VANET

Efficient data dissemination to a desired number of receivers in a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a new issue and a challenging one considering the dynamic nature of VANETs. We aim to accurately control the number of receivers in a particular area of interest, achieve low dissemination delay, and incur only small communication overhead. To achieve these goals, we designed the data dissemination to a desired number of receivers in VANET (DOVE) scheme. DOVE is inspired by processor scheduling treating roads as processors to optimize the workload assignment and improve the efficiency of on-road dissemination. DOVE reaches the desired number of receivers with little inaccuracy and minimizes the dissemination delay with low communication overhead. We enhance our protocol with workload backup to deal with vehicles that are quitting the network. We utilize the unique characteristics of VANET and propose heuristics accordingly to significantly reduce the dissemination delay and overhead. Simulation results show that our scheme can disseminate data to almost all the pregiven number of receivers with a light overhead and low delay.