TBD: Trajectory-Based Data Forwarding for Light-Traffic Vehicular Networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a Trajectory-Based Data Forwarding (TBD) scheme, tailored for the data forwarding in light-traffic vehicular ad-hoc networks. We consider the scenarios in which Internet access points are sparsely deployed to receive the roadside reports of time-critical information such as driving accident or hazard. Since the Internet access points have limited communication coverage, a vehicular ad-hoc network is needed to forward data packets to the access points. State-of-the-art schemes have demonstrated the effectiveness of their data forwarding strategies by exploiting known vehicular traffic statistics (e.g., densities and speeds) in such a network. These results are encouraging, however, further improvements can be made by taking advantage of the growing popularity of GPS-based navigation systems. This paper presents the first attempt to investigate how to effectively utilize vehicles' trajectory information in a privacy-preserving manner. In our design, the trajectory information is combined with the traffic statistics to improve the performance of data forwarding in road networks. Through theoretical analysis and extensive simulation, it is shown that our design outperforms the existing scheme in terms of both the data delivery delay and packet delivery ratio, specially under light-traffic situations.