UAV-Aided Data Dissemination Protocol with Dynamic Trajectory Scheduling in VANETs

Data dissemination is a promising application in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) to overcome the limitation in the connection time of specific vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) links, and provide efficient large data file transfer from road-side units (RSUs) to vehicles therein. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), recently regarded as an effective supplement in wireless networks, can provide line-of-sight (LoS) links with better channel quality, and their high flexibility and maneuverability are beneficial for on-demand deployment in communication systems. In this paper, by employing UAVs as flying relays with data caching capability in VANETs, we design an enhanced UAV-aided data dissemination protocol. Specifically, we propose a centralized UAV trajectory scheduling algorithm based dynamic programming (CTS-DP) to optimize the flying routes of UAVs. Then, based on the scheduled trajectories of UAVs, we further propose a centralized UAV-aided data dissemination scheduling strategy to achieve both effective and efficient coordination of the RSUs, UAVs, and vehicles for data dissemination. Numerical simulations in vehicular scenarios verify the efficiency of the proposed protocol with dynamic UAV trajectory scheduling in terms of downloading progress, data dissemination delay, and system throughput.