COOPERATIVE MECHANISMS TO CARRY AND FORWARD PACKETS IN A DTN VANET

The aim of this paper is to find the best strategies to carry and forward packets within VANETs that follow a Delay Tolerant Network. In this environment nodes are affected by intermittent connectivity and topology constantly changes. When no route is available and the link failure percentage is high, the data must be physically transported by vehicles to destinations. Results show how, using vehicles cooperation and several carry and forward mechanisms with different deliver priorities, is possible to improve performance for free in terms of data transmissions. In our experiments we use realistic traffic data obtained by multi-agent traffic simulator and also study which are the best conditions to apply our mechanism in an everyday scenario.