Network-Coding-Assisted Data Dissemination via Cooperative Vehicle-to-Vehicle/-Infrastructure Communications

Vehicle-to-vehicle/vehicle-to-infrastructure (referred to as V2X) communications have potential to revolutionize current road transportation systems with respect to vehicle safety, transportation efficiency, and travel experience. This paper puts the first effort on applying network coding in cooperative V2X communication environments to improve bandwidth efficiency and enhance data service performance. Specifically, we investigate new arising challenges on network-coding-assisted data dissemination by considering both communication constraints and application requirements in vehicular networks. We present the system model and give an insight into the characteristics of cooperative data dissemination with network coding. On this basis, we formulate the problem and propose a network-coding-assisted scheduling algorithm to enable the hybrid of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications and exploit their joint effects on providing efficient data services. We design a cache strategy that allows vehicles to retrieve their unrequested data items. This strategy not only increases the opportunity of data sharing among vehicles but also gives higher probability of packet decoding, which in turn enhances the data service performance. We give an intensive analysis on the scheduling overhead, which shows the scalability of the algorithm. Finally, we build the simulation model and conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed solution.