A collaborative information maintenance scheme with reliable broadcast for urban zones

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are expected to be used in many aspects ranging from road safety applications to business or service information dissemination. Sometimes to maintain the information in a particular zone for a period of time is necessary, but it is generally difficult to implement without any infrastructure support, since vehicular nodes move continuously at a high speed. This paper proposes a collaborative information maintenance scheme with reliable broadcast for maintaining information at urban zones, which guarantees high successful maintain probability and minimizes the packet delivery overhead with little broadcast delay. An analytical model is developed to analyze the relationship between the successful maintain probability and the average vehicle density. Simulation results show that, as long as the average vehicle density is no less than one vehicle per hundred meters, the information will be successfully maintained at the zone. Thus, we believe it is easy to maintain some information in urban zones without any infrastructure support.