ROADNET: Fairness- and Throughput-Enhanced Scheduling for Content Dissemination in VANETs

The increasing demand for bandwidth by applications in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs), combined with the increasing number of their users, stresses the importance of data dissemination schemes that strike a balance between network throughput and user fairness. Ensuring this balance is challenging in vehicular networks, which are characterized by a high dynamism of the network topology, volatility of intervehicular links, and heterogeneity of the exchanged content. For these reasons, we hereby introduce ROADNET, a cooperative content dissemination scheme for VANETs. Leveraging on the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm, ROADNET provides a trade-off between network throughput and user fairness by exploiting the logical centralized control of SDN and the multichannel operation of the IEEE 1609.4 standard. Realistic simulation results show that our scheme outperforms prior works in terms of both throughput (≈ 36%) and fairness (≈ 6%), providing high channel load balance (σ ≈ 1%).