File Transfer Between Charging Stations Goes Infrastructureless: A Code–Delay Tradeoff

In an energy harvesting vehicular network, efficient file transfer between two charging stations is challenging due to the lack of communication infrastructure. Naturally, a source station can allocate the packets to a set of vehicles, which serve as relays to opportunistically deliver these packets to the destination station while performing their own tasks. In this paper, we show that, with packet-level erasure coding (e.g., fountain codes), only a few redundant packets are required to achieve a significant reduction in file delay. As more redundant packets are added, however, the file delay improvement diminishes, and the storage cost rises. In both the single and multiple-destination scenarios, the fundamental tradeoffs between coding and file delay are characterized. For the multiple-destination scenario, there exists a unique and optimal coding rate that minimizes the average file delay. We propose a greedy algorithm that can achieve this minimum delay in practice. Finally, the proposed tradeoffs are verified through intensive numerical experiments.