CFT: A Cluster-based File Transfer Scheme for Highway VANETs

Abstract— Effective file transfer between vehicles is fundamen-tal 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. Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have attracted much attention in both academia and industry. Among the problems to be tackled in VANETs, effective vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) file transfer is fundamental to many emerging infotainment applications, such as content distribution and file sharing. However, it remains to be a very challenging problem because inter-vehicle links tend to be short-lived and lossy thanks to fast node mobility. < final year projects >