Improving Information Dissemination in Vehicular Opportunistic Networks

The goal of this paper is to evaluate the dissemination of information using traces of real vehicles from two cities: Rome and San Francisco. Concretely, we perform an analysis of the temporal and spatial characteristics of these traces. Then, using the Epidemic Protocol, we evaluate the diffusion of the information according to the size of the message. As expected, the experiments show that the size of the message has a great impact on the dissemination of these messages. Eventually, we propose an improvement to the Epidemic protocol, called Epidem icX2, which is based on the division of large messages to increase their delivery opportunity. The results show that EpidemicX2 increases the diffusion (number of vehicles receiving the message) reducing the delivery time and the incurred overhead when compared to the Epidemic protocol.