Abstract

Abstract—We present a communication protocol, called LINGER, for persistent dissemination of delay-tolerant informa-tion to vehicular users, within a geographical area of interest. The goal of LINGER is to dispatch and confine information in local-ized areas of a mobile network with minimal protocol overhead and without requiring knowledge of the vehicles ’ routes or desti-nations. LINGER does not require roadside infrastructure sup-port: it selects mobile nodes in a distributed, cooperative way and lets them act as “information bearers”, providing uninterrupted information availability within a desired region. We analyze the performance of our dissemination mechanism through extensive simulations, in complex vehicular scenarios with realistic node mobility. The results demonstrate that LINGER represents a viable, appealing alternative to infrastructure-based solutions, as it can successfully drive the information toward a region of interest from a far away source and keep it local with negligible overhead. We show the effectiveness of such an approach in the support of localized broadcasting, in terms of both percentage of informed vehicles and information delivery delay, and we compare its performance to that of a dedicated, state-of-the-art protocol. Index Terms—Vehicular networks, information dissemination, localized services. I.