Data Pouring and Buffering on the Road: A New Data Dissemination Paradigm for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have recently received considerable attention. To support VANET-based applications, it is important to disseminate data from an information source (data center) to many vehicles on the road. Although disseminating data from a server to a large number of clients has been studied in the database community and the network community, many unique characteristics of the VANET bring out new research challenges. In this paper, we propose a data pouring (DP) and buffering paradigm to address the data dissemination problem in a VANET. In DP, data are periodically broadcast to vehicles on the road. In DP with intersection buffering (DP-IB), data poured from the source are buffered and rebroadcast at the intersections. We provide analytical models to explore the dissemination capacity (DC) of the proposed schemes. The analytical models also provide guidelines on choosing the system parameters to maximize the DC under different delivery ratio requirements. Simulation results show that the proposed DP-IB scheme can significantly improve the data delivery ratio and reduce network traffic.