Cooperative Store–Carry–Forward Scheme for Intermittently Connected Vehicular Networks

Intermittently connected vehicular networks (ICVNs) consist of stationary roadside units (RSUs) deployed along the highway and mobile vehicles. ICVNs are generally infrastructure constrained with a long inter-RSU distance, leading to large dark areas and transmission outage. In this paper, we propose a novel cooperative store-carry-forward (CSCF) scheme to reduce the transmission outage time of vehicles in the dark areas. The CSCF scheme utilizes bidirectional vehicle streams and selects two vehicles in both directions to serve as relays successively for the target vehicle via inter-RSU cooperation. Compared with the existing schemes, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CSCF scheme has a great advantage in reducing transmission outage time.