Disseminating a Large Amount of Data to Vehicular Network in an Urban Area

The problem of distributing a large amount of data from multiple sources in an urban area is investigated. We explore an opportunistic approach for information collection, in which a vehicle obtains information about resources from encountered vehicles. This protocol could be applied in both dense and sparse vehicular networks. Due to the highly dynamic nature of the underlying vehicular network topology, we depart from architectures requiring centralized coordination, reliable MAC scheduling, or global network state knowledge, and instead adopt a distributed paradigm with simple protocols. In other words, a reliable dissemination is introduced from multiple sources when each node in the network shares a limited amount of its resources for cooperating with others. By using rateless coding at the Road Side Unit (RSU) and using vehicles as data carriers, an efficient way to achieve reliable dissemination to all nodes (even disconnected clusters in the network) is described.