Abstract

In vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), store-carry-forward approach may be used for data sharing, where moving vehicles carry and exchange data when they go by each other. In this ap-proach, storage resource in a vehicle is generally limited. Therefore, attributes of data that have to be stored in vehicles are an important factor in order to efficiently distribute desired data. In VA-NETs, there are different types of data which depend on the time and location. Such kind of data cannot be deployed adequately to the requesting vehicles only by popularity-based rule. In this paper, we propose a data distribution method that takes into account the effective life and area in addition to popularity of data. Our extensive simulation results demonstrate drastic improve-ments on acquisition performance of the time and area specific data.