Data dissemination in vehicular networks: Challenges, solutions, and future perspectives

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have emerged as an exciting research and application area. The envisioned applications, as well as some inherent VANET characteristics such as highly dynamic topology, frequently disconnected network, and different and dynamic network density, make data dissemination a challenging task in these networks. Several approaches for data dissemination in VANETs have been recently proposed in the literature. However, more work needs to be done since most of the proposed solutions do not effectively address some or all of the main challenges in these scenarios such as the broadcast storm, network partition and temporal network fragmentation. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive and critical review of proposed techniques for data dissemination in VANETs and identify the main challenges in this area. For this, we first define suitable criteria to classify and organize some of the existing solutions. Next we identify and discuss some open issues and conclude with possible future research directions.