Multi-hop data dissemination with replicas in vehicular sensor networks

This paper proposes a novel multi-hop data dissemination method using data replication technique to collect sensor data in Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSN). Currently, existing network protocols for general sensor networks pose problems when used in VSN applications. Even the majority of research based on VSN network protocols has some problems, as they limit their data harvesting schemes to only single-hop or short distance transmissions, or use high-cost relay stations to support multi-hop cases. As a result, these works cannot completely solve some critical issues in VSN, such as data transmission delay, packet overhead, and network connectivity. We believe such problems can be alleviated by our scheme, which uses replicas in a multi-hop data dissemination scheme. Our simulation study conducted using the QualNet 4.0 simulator shows the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.