Co-Operative Load Balancing in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs)

Recently data dissemination using Road Side Units RSUs in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks VANETs received considerable attention for overcoming the vehicle to vehicle frequent disconnection problem. An RSU becomes overloaded due to its mounting location and/or during rush hour overload. As an RSU has short wireless transmission coverage range and vehicles are mobile, a heavily overloaded RSU may experience high deadline miss rate in effect of serving too many requests beyond its capacity. In this work, the authors propose a co-operative multiple-RSU model, which offers the opportunity to the RSUs with high volume workload to transfer some of its overloaded requests to other RSUs that have light workload and located in the direction in which the vehicle is heading. Moreover, for performing the load balancing, the authors propose three different heuristic load transfer approaches. By a series of simulation experiments, the authors demonstrate the proposed co-operative multiple-RSU based load balancing model significantly outperforms the non-load balancing multiple-RSU based VANETs model against a number of performance metrics.