DTN-based vehicular cloud for post-disaster information sharing

We first propose a framework which utilizes vehicular delay tolerant network (DTN) to form a vehicular cloud in order to provide information exchange without communication infrastructure. The framework does not rely on cellular network and therefore provides an approach which is suitable for post-disaster communication where cellular network is unavailable or severely congested. The paper also proposes a protocol which is able to provide vehicle-to-cloud communication in frequently changing vehicular environment. The protocol takes into account the link throughput, additional signal coverage, connection time, and the probability to encounter a RSU for the forwarder selection by using a fuzzy logic-based approach. The protocol also employs a network coding approach to reduce the overhead while maintaining a high data delivery ratio. We use computer simulations to evaluate the proposed framework.