Public Transportation Assisted Data Delivery Scheme in Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks

As an important component of transportation system, public transportation accounts for considerable proportion in the whole traffic flow. The public transportation vehicles can be categorized to two types: ones with determinate trajectories and schedules such as bus, tramway and light rail; the others with flexible and variable running paths, such as taxis. In this paper, we firstly present a driving path prediction method based destination gathering for taxis, which can make taxis' driving paths prescient in the initial stage of carrying passengers every time. Comparing with ordinary vehicles, public transportation vehicles have such features as long time running on roads, no privacy-protection need, and thus their trajectories can been opened. Through utilizing the features above, we propose a novel Public Transportation assisted Data Delivery scheme (PTDD) used to improve the performance of data delivery of Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks (VDTNs). Simulation results based on a real map demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.