The multi-copy diversity for routing in sparse vehicular ad hoc networks

The need for routing based on store-and-carry forwarding has been motivated in sparse vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), since the traditional end-to-end unicast routing is infeasible due to the network disconnection problem. In store-and-carry based routing, the end-to-end message delivery delay is dominated by the store-and-carry procedure rather than the wireless transmission. Therefore, the end-to-end delay in such sparse VANETs can be further reduced by replicating multiple copies of the message to other nodes when possible, i.e., multi-copy routing, to increase the chance of finally finding the destination, which we call this gain as multi-copy diversity. In this paper, we present an analytic framework to evaluate the performance of routing by assessing the multi-copy diversity gain in sparse VANETs. By using this model, we first derive an upper and lower-bound of end-to-end routing delay in sparse VANETs. Our analytic results show that a high level of multi-copy diversity gain is achieved when the network is partially connected, which is in contrast to the conventional expectation that multi-copy routing performs better in severely disconnected networks. Second, we propose a new adaptive multi-copy VANET routing scheme called AMR by exploiting these analytic results. AMR adapts to the local network connectivity and increases the level of multi-copy diversity at significantly reduced routing overhead compared to the well known epidemic routing. We validate the accuracy of our analytic model and the performance of AMR via simulation studies.