CFT: A Cluster-based File Transfer Scheme for Highway

TL;DR

The paper introduces CFT, a cluster-based file transfer scheme designed for highway VANETs, which improves file transfer success rates despite high vehicle mobility and short-lived connections.

Contribution

CFT is a fully-distributed, cluster-based scheme that enhances file transfer reliability in highway VANETs without roadside infrastructure.

Findings

CFT outperforms existing schemes in file transfer success rate.

CFT effectively utilizes vehicle collaboration for data transfer.

The scheme operates without roadside unit assistance.

Abstract

Effective file transfer between vehicles is fundamental to many emerging vehicular infotainment applications in the highway Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), such as content distribution and social networking. However, due to fast mobility, the connection between vehicles tends to be short-lived and lossy, which makes intact file transfer extremely challenging. To tackle this problem, we presents a novel Cluster-based File Transfer (CFT) scheme for highway VANETs in this paper. With CFT, when a vehicle requests a file, the transmission capacity between the resource vehicle and the destination vehicle is evaluated. If the requested file can be successfully transferred over the direct Vehicular-to-Vehicular (V2V) connection, the file transfer will be completed by the resource and the destination themselves. Otherwise, a cluster will be formed to help the file transfer. As a fully-distributed scheme that relies on the collaboration of cluster members, CFT does not require any assistance from roadside units or access points. Our experimental results indicate that CFT outperforms the existing file transfer schemes for highway VANETs.