Providing fairness between multiple flows in vehicular networks

In emerging non-safety unicast applications of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) such as Internet Access, Content, Map, or Database Download (CMDD), end-to-end and connection-oriented transmission control must be employed to guarantee a desired level of performance. It is envisioned that in the future, these non-safety applications will involve several concurrent flows. Providing a fair distribution of goodput and bandwidth among these concurrent flows will therefore be crucial. To tackle this significant issue, in this paper we propose a Cooperative Routing Protocol (CROP) which, in conjunction with the local packet scheduling and queue management, can reduce the inherent unfairness of the transport layer as well as MAC protocol used in the DSRC standard. Our results show that the proposed cooperative routing concept provides significant improvement in terms of per-flow goodput, end-to-end delays, jitter, and fairness at the expense of a very small decrease in the overall system goodput.