A data distribution scheme for VANET based on fountain code

Data dissemination is one of the applications used to provide infotainment to the end-users in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). During this process, the vehicles receive the data broadcast by the RoadSide Unit (RSU). However, it is difficult for vehicles to collect the complete content within the communication range of one RSU when the vehicle moves at a high speed and the amount of broadcast data is large. To solve this problem, a multi-RSU cooperative data distribution scheme based on fountain code (MRFC) is proposed in this paper. The source data are encoded by fountain code and poured into the VANET by multiple cooperative RSUs, then the vehicles in the area share data packets through the V2V resource compensation method, so that all vehicles can obtain enough encoded packets to reconstruct the source data. To improve channel resource utilization and reduce delivery delays, the RSUs use fuzzy logic to determine the number of fountain code packets according to their locations, the speed and density of surrounding vehicles. The experimental results show that on the premise of ensuring the delivery rate, the proposed scheme can reduce the delivery delay by 30–50%, and achieve a significant improvement in performance.