On the effects of mobility for efficient broadcast data dissemination in I2V networks

In this paper, we consider the problem of disseminating data in Infrastructure-to-Vehicular (I2V) networks. In particular, given a fixed Road Side Unit (RSU) we evaluate the maximum amount of data that can be reliably transferred from the RSU to the vehicles passing in its proximity through a recently proposed multihop probabilistic broadcasting protocol, namely Irresponsible Forwarding (IF). In particular, referring to highway-like Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs), we first characterize a mobile scenario in such a way to make a direct comparison with a static scenario meaningful, taking into account a physical characterization of the network (e.g., in terms of vehicle spatial density). Then, we carry out a comparative investigation considering mobile and static IEEE 802.11 networking scenarios. Our results show that from a single packet perspective, the vehicles' mobility does not affect the behavior of the IF protocol, at least in the considered highway scenarios. However, different conclusions are reached when an information flow (i.e., a series of consecutive packets) is considered. In this context, we determine the maximum amount of data that can be transferred from the RSU to the mobile vehicles passing through a certain region of interest around the RSU.