DIVINE: Data offloading in vehicular networks with QoS provisioning

In vehicular networks, vehicles may carry various types of data that need to be offloaded to the RoadSide Units (RSUs) through Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications when vehicles come into their coverage. RSUs are not widely deployed everywhere, which causes intermittent connectivity between vehicles and RSUs. In this paper, we propose DIVINE, a Data offloading In VehIcular NEtworks scheme with QoS provisioning, which enables a vehicle to offload its data to RSU directly through V2I communications or using other neighboring vehicles through Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications. DIVINE considers the connectivity time of an offloading vehicle with the RSU, with other vehicles heading either on the same or opposite direction, offloading capacity, expected time to reach RSU and contact duration with neighboring vehicles. Additionally, the Quality of Service (QoS) is an important consideration for data offloading in vehicular networks due to the coexistence of urgent data to offload (e.g., accident or emergency data). Therefore, for QoS provisioning, DIVINE uses three QoS functions: traffic classification, overload control and admission control. DIVINE is presented with algorithms and procedures, as well as with illustrative examples. The performance evaluation in network simulator OMNeT++ with Veins and SUMO frameworks shows that DIVINE outperforms other schemes in terms of average offloading delay, maximum offloading delay and running time for a varying number of vehicles, maximum speed values, number of RSUs and RSUs’ capacity. It also best behaves in terms of amount of offloaded important data.