VADD: Vehicle-Assisted Data Delivery in Vehicular

Abstract—Multi-hop data delivery through vehicular ad hoc networks is complicated by the fact that vehicular networks are highly mobile and frequently disconnected. To address this issue, we adopt the idea of carry and forward, where a moving vehicle carries the packet until a new vehicle moves into its vicinity and forwards the packet. Different from existing carry and forward solutions, we make use of the predicable vehicle mobility, which is limited by the traffic pattern and road layout. Based on the existing traffic pattern, a vehicle can find the next road to forward the packet to reduce the delay. We propose several vehicle-assisted data delivery (VADD) protocols to forward the packet to the best road with the lowest data delivery delay. Experimental results are used to evaluate the proposed solutions. Results show that the proposed VADD protocols outperform existing solutions in terms of packet delivery ratio, data packet delay and protocol overhead. Among the proposed VADD protocols, the H-VADD protocol has much better performance. I