I2V highway and urban vehicular networks: a comparative analysis of the impact of mobility on broadcast data dissemination

In this paper, we consider the problem of disseminating data in Infrastructure-to-Vehicular (I2V) IEEE 802.11 networks. We analyze, with a comparative approach, the performance in highway and urban scenarios. In particular, after characterizing the mobility in these scenarios we analyze the performance in terms of data dissemination from a fixed Road Side Unit (RSU) to the vehicles passing in its proximity through a recently proposed multihop probabilistic broadcasting protocol, namely Irresponsible Forwarding (IF). In the case of highway-like Vehicular Ad-Hoc NETworks (VANETs), we first characterize a mobile scenario in such a way to make a direct comparison with a static scenario meaningful, taking into account a physical characterization of the network (e.g., in terms of vehicle spatial density). Then, we consider a few mobile urban scenarios, characterized by the presence of junctions regulated by Traffic Lights (TLs) and Roundabouts (Rs). Our results show that, from a single packet perspective, the vehicles’ mobility does not affect the behavior of the IF protocol, at least in the considered mobile scenarios (both highway and urban). However, different conclusions are reached when an information flow (i.e., a series of consecutive packets) is considered. In this context, we determine the maximum amount of data which can be transferred from the RSU to the mobile vehicles passing through a certain Region Of Interest (ROI) around the RSU.