Analytically modelling the performance of piggybacking on beacons in VANETs

Piggybacking on beacons is a forwarding technique in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) as a means to disseminate data. With this technique data is attached to and transmitted along with scheduled beacons. Nodes are assumed to beacon asynchronously. In this paper we present a first version of an analytical model that is able to accurately capture the performance of a piggybacking protocol inside a VANET in a number of closed-form expressions, assuming some simplifications. For a given forwarding distance, transmission range, node density, and beacon frequency, the model is able to give the stochastic distribution of the end-to-end delay. The model also provides the distribution of the per-hop delay, the hop length, and the position of the ith forwarder. We have verified our analytical model using a simulation study. The most relevant assumptions in our model are a fixed inter-node distance and a fixed deterministic transmission range. Having completed this stage of our work, our next goal is to extend our model so that we can drop these assumptions.