Performance Study of Robust Data Transfer Protocol for VANETs

Abstract

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have emerged as a new network environment for intelligent transportation systems. In this paper, we focus on traffic monitoring (TM) and roadside message transfer (RMT) applications. The TM application (TMA) allows drivers to query traffic conditions at some distance ahead of themselves so that they can make decisions on route changes. The RMT application (RMTA) allows data messages to be delivered between roadside entities e.g. emergency messages, via the moving vehicles. We design a robust data transfer protocol (RDTP), and evaluate its effectiveness on the two applications with various vehicular density and vehicular speed. Our study shows that our protocol achieves comparably accurate speed estimate and higher query success rate with lower control overhead than VITP, an existing protocol designed for TMA. It also achieves higher data throughput and lower delivery latency than another existing approach for RMTA.