Index Coding-based Data Exchange in a Vehicular Network Junction

Traffic lights play crucial roles in maintaining the smooth transition of vehicles from one road segment to another. They have evolved from time-based controllers to adaptive and density-based traffic regulators. They can now even provide more advanced capabilities such as data processing, storage, and computation. In this work, we investigate data dissemination in an intersection with the traffic light acting as the intelligent roadside unit (RSU) that can receive and broadcast demanded environment data from/to its nearby vehicles. Information exchange is implemented by utilizing the index coding-based transmission scheme able to optimize the number of transmissions and transmitted data size while satisfying vehicular demands depending on its availability. Assuming various mobility scenarios and incorporating the presence or absence of stored information, two transmission schemes are compared. We evaluate the single junction data exchange between vehicles and infrastructure in terms of data map throughput, message security, number of broadcast transmissions, and amount of consumed wireless bandwidth. Our simulation results highlight the advantage of the index coding-based transmission scheme over the conventional broadcasting technique by inspecting the performance metrics used in the study.