Performance Study of Robust Data Transfer Protocol for VANETs

VANETs has emerged as the new network environment for intelligent transportations systems. In this paper, we focus on two types of VANET applications and evaluate the effectiveness of our data dissemination protocol for these two types of applications. In particular, we investigate traffic monitoring (TM) and roadside message transfer (RMT) applications. The traffic monitoring application (TMA) allows drivers to query traffic conditions at some distance ahead of themselves so that they can make decisions on route changes. The roadside message transfer 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) for these two applications. Via simulation studies, we evaluate how vehicular density, vehicular speed affect the performance of the data transfer protocol we design. We also compare the performance of our protocol with two existing protocols. For TMA, RDTP achieves comparably accurate speed estimate and higher query success rate with lower control overhead when compared to VITP, an existing protocol for the same application. For RMTA, RDTP achieves higher data throughput and lower delivery latency when compared to an existing approach.