Contact-Aware Data Replication in Roadside Unit Aided Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks

Roadside units (RSUs), which enable vehicles-to-infrastructure communications, are deployed along roadsides to handle the ever-growing communication demands caused by explosive increase of vehicular traffics. How to efficiently utilize them to enhance the vehicular delay tolerant network (VDTN) performance are the important problems in designing RSU-aided VDTNs. In this work, we implement an extensive experiment involving tens of thousands of operational vehicles in Beijing city. Based on this newly collected Beijing trace and the existing Shanghai trace, we obtain some invariant properties for communication contacts of large scale RSU-aided VDTNs. Specifically, we find that the contact time between RSUs and vehicles obeys an exponential distribution, while the contact rate between them follows a Poisson distribution. According to these observations, we investigate the problem of communication contact-aware mobile data replication for RSU-aided VDTNs by considering the mobile data dissemination system that transmits data from the Internet to vehicles via RSUs through opportunistic communications. In particular, we formulate the communication contact-aware RSU-aided vehicular mobile data dissemination problem as an optimization problem with realistic VDTN settings, and we provide an efficient heuristic solution for this NP-hard problem. By carrying out extensive simulation using realistic vehicular traces, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed heuristic contact-aware data replication scheme, in comparison with the optimal solution and other existing schemes.