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Efficient Data Scheduling in VANETs

Vishal Kumar, Narottam Chand

Abstract— This paper primarily focuses on scheduling the requests in an optimize manner. We address some challenges in
vehicle roadside data access. We propose a priority based scheduling scheme called D* S/P to consider both service deadline
and data size along with priority when making scheduling decisions. These requests are queued in different combinations of
priorities to apply the scheduling algorithm. Once the combinations are applied, the request with the highest priority is served
first. Simulation results show that the scheduling scheme performs better in comparison to other scheduling schemes. Further,
the scheduling scheme is adaptive to different workload scenarios.

Index Terms— Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), RSU, scheduling, queue.

——————————  ——————————

1 INTRODUCTION

W ITH the increase in the number of vehicles the pos-

sibility of accidents has also increased. Therefore it
is required to make such a system which could
help in reducing the possibilities of accidents. A vehicular
ad-hoc network (VANET) is an effort towards this which
adds ability in the vehicles to communicate each other
(V2V) or with the infrastructure (V2I). A lot of work has
been done to address data dissemination issues in vehicu-
lar ad hoc networks (VANETs). Broadly there are two
approaches when we consider V2I or I2V dissemination;
push based and pull based approach. In the push based
approach [4, 5, 19] the info-stations also called roadside
units push out the data to everyone. This approach has its
application in disseminating traffic alerts, weather alert,
etc. The pull based approach [4, 8, 9] is based on request-
response model as this is based on user specific data. Re-
cently, vehicle-roadside data access has received consi-
derable attention. In vehicle-roadside data access, the
RSU can act as a router for vehicles to access the internet.
Although this can bring many benefits to the drivers, the
deployment cost and maintenance cost are very high. As
another option, RSU can also be just used as a buffer
point (or data island) between vehicles. In this thesis we
focus on the scheduling of the data at these data centers
or RSUs. In this paradigm, all data on the RSUs are up-
loaded or downloaded by vehicles.
Many different and sometimes competing design goals
have to be taken into account for VANETs to ensure their
commercial success. When equipped with WAVE (Wire-
less Access in Vehicular Environment), forms a highly
dynamic network. Due to this dynamic nature, the ve-
hicles requests to be serviced create a time limitation. Our
work aims at prioritizing and scheduling of the requests
arriving at the data center in vehicular ad-hoc network.
————————————————
 Vishal Kumar is with the Department of Computer Science & Engineering,
National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, INDIA-177005.
 Dr. Narottam Chand is with the Department of Computer Science & Engi-
neering, National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, INDIA-177005.
Currently, most existing data scheduling techniques con-
sider only two parameters data size and deadline in-
volved in vehicle ad-hoc networks [14, 15]. Their main
focus is on specific elements involved in the communica-
tion, such as medium access, vehicle mobility, traffic flow,
routing, etc. The challenges for VANETs raise the de-
mand for a more perfect data dissemination technique.
The goal of this paper is to schedule the data efficiently
by considering parameters like deadline, data size and
priority of the request. To do this, the following problems
are addressed:
1. First, it is essential to be thoroughly familiar with
the characteristics of vehicular ad-hoc networks.
Thus, the initial task is to analyze data dissemi-
nation techniques, routing and scheduling ap-
proaches used in vehicular networks.
2. The second challenge is to consider the existing
data scheduling techniques in vehicular ad-hoc
network. It means to deal how to schedule the
data in high mobile environment so as to serve as
many requests as possible. Thus, we have to ana-
lyze existing data scheduling techniques of VA-
NETs.
3. Third challenge is to analyze the different factors
which are considered in existing data scheduling
techniques of VANETs. In this way determine
the factors which should be included in existing
techniques to schedule the data efficiently.
4. Fourth challenge is to apply additional feature
like priority to the existing scheme for better
scheduling in VANETs. Then determine how
much improvement has got after adding these
additional features.  
 
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Based  on  the  above  mentioned  challenges,  we  have  pro‐
posed the following:
 
 A new scheme called D*S/P which considers da-
ta size, request deadline and priority of the re-
quests to be served.
 Study the frequency of various messages based
on the priority assigned to the messages.
 Simulation to study the performance of the pro-
posed scheduling scheme.
 Compare the proposed scheme with existing
scheme.
Several mobile computing systems such as MobiEyes and
CarTel [20] were designed and implemented by UCLA
and MIT, respectively to collect process and deliver data
from sensors located on vehicles to roadside infrastruc-
tures for analysis. The similar projects include the Di-
eselNet at Umass [25], FleetNet in Germany [19], Inter-
netCAR in Japan [21]. Vehicles are moving at a high
speed and they stay in the area of roadside units only for
a short period of time. Therefore scheduling of data is
very crucial so as to serve as much requests as possible,
reducing delay of downloading etc. Scheduling is an im-
portant issue for data access in vehicular environment. In
the next section, we shall study the work related to the
scheduling for vehicle-roadside data access.
2 RELATED WORK
Earlier a large amount of work related to CPU and job
scheduling is done in the literature. Wong studied several
scheduling algorithms such as first-come-first-serve
(FCFS), longest wait time (LWT), most requests first
(MRF) in the broadcasting environments [9]. Later, many
broadcast scheduling algorithms have been proposed to
reduce the waiting time and energy consumption [17].
Acharya and Muthukrishnan [11] addressed the broad-
cast scheduling problem in heterogeneous environments,
where data items have different sizes. The solution is
based on a new metric called Stretch, defined as the ratio
of the response time of a request to its service time. Based
on stretch, they proposed a scheduling algorithm, called
longest total stretch first (LTSF) to optimize the stretch
and achieve a balance between the worst case and the
average case. However, a straightforward implementa-
tion of LTSF is not practical for a large system, as at each
broadcast time, the server has to recalculate the total
stretch for every data item with pending requests in order
to decide which data to broadcast next, and hence the
scheduling algorithm becomes a bottleneck due to the
high computation overhead. The work in [12] introduced
the concept of Quality Contracts (QCs) which combines
the two incomparable performance metrics: response time
or Quality of Service (QoS), and staleness or Quality of
Data (QoD). QCs allow individual users to express their
preferences for the expected QoS and QoD of their que-
ries by assigning “profit” values. They proposed an adap-
tive algorithm to maximize the total profit from submit-
34
ted QCs. This work is also based on point-to-point com-
munication and does not take advantage of broadcasting.
All these works mainly focus on responsiveness such as
average/worst- case waiting time or fairness without
considering the time constraints of the user requests.
However, in vehicular networks, time constraint of the
request has to be considered. Jiang and Vaidya [10], Rajan
et al. [17] and Xu et al. [18] studied the scheduling prob-
lem in real-time broadcasting environment and took time
constraint into account. The authors in [18] investigated
online scheduling algorithms for time critical on- demand
data broadcast. However, they ignored the data update
issue. They assumed that data are read only or can only
be updated by the server. Hence, they only tried to im-
prove the service ratio for download broadcasting. In con-
trast, our vehicle-roadside data access model is different
as both update and download compete for the same
bandwidth. Also, missing the update degrades the data
quality.
The authors in [1] gave the first understanding of the im-
pact of the vehicle’s speed, transmission rate, 802.11 bit-
rate, and packet size on throughput and delay of vehicle-
roadside communication and illustrated a basic picture of
how running vehicles contact with roadside hot spots
through a “drive-thru” data access. In various earlier
works deadline constraints of the requests were not con-
sidered. However, some works took into account dead-
line for some requests and found that the requests shall
be dropped completely if vehicles move out from the RSU
area. In this case if the request is urgent shall not be
served and dropped.
The authors in [15] proposed a basic scheduling scheme
called D*S to consider both deadline and data size when
making scheduling decisions. To make use of wireless
broadcasting, the authors gave another scheduling
scheme called D*S/N to serve multiple requests with a
single broadcast. The authors also identified the effects of
upload requests on data quality, and proposed a Two-
step scheduling scheme to provide a balance between
serving download and upload requests. They have com-
pared the three naive schemes; FCFS, FDF and SDF and
showed their performance and limitations. In [15] authors
proposed a scheduling algorithm in which each file is
chopped in several segments. If a vehicle shall not be able
to finish downloading all segments from the RSU then the
algorithm allows the vehicle to continue downloading the
segments from the next RSU. The authors have also inves-
tigated the problems of scheduling of file distribution
from roadside unit (RSU) to the vehicle in the urban envi-
ronment. The work in [15] considers the parameters given
in [16].
We consider the problem of providing or reducing the
delay to those requests which needs to be served imme-
diately. We build our strategy on previous work in this
area [15, 16]. We are proposing our scheme that shall con-
sider priority and serves the requests with priority first
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otherwise the scheme behaves similar to the scheme pro-
posed by [15]. In this paper, we have studied the applica-
tion-layer scheduling for vehicle-roadside data access. We
propose and implement our scheme at the application
layer and call it D*S/P.
3 PRIORITY BASED DATA SCHEDULING (D*S/P)
All vehicles can send requests to the RSU if they want to
access the data. Each request is characterized by a 5-tuple:
<v-id, d-id, op, deadline, r-priority>,
where v-id is the identifier of the vehicle, d-id is the iden-
tifier of the requested data item, op is the operation that
the vehicle wants to do (upload or download), deadline is
the critical time constraint of the request, beyond which
the service becomes useless and r-priority is the priority
sent with the request according to the message type.
Vehicle request data
Is 0≤P ≤ 3
P-list D-list S-list
Service Processing
Fig.1. Flowchart of D*S/P scheme 
The proposed scheduling algorithm maintains the sorted
list each for deadline (D), data size (S) and priority (P).
These three lists are as follows:
1. One list called D-List (Deadline-list) is used to
record the deadline (D value) of each request. D-
List is ordered by the increasing deadline of each
request.
35
TABLE 1
POSSIBLE VALUES OF P
P Meaning
0 Normal
1 Accidental
2 Possibility of Emergency
3 Warning/Alerts
2. The second list called S-List (dataSize-list) is used
to record the size (S value) of the data item that is
asked by the request. S-List is sorted in ascending
order of the data size.
3. The third list called P-list (Priority-list) is used to
record the priority of the request.
Algorithm Implementation of D*S/P:
1. The requests arrive at the RSU.
2. The tuples of the request are read which consist
of parameters including priority.
3. The P parameter is evaluated if its value lies be-
tween 0 ≤ P≤ 3, then the request is specially
treated on priority.
4. Otherwise, the algorithm runs similar to the D*S
scheduling scheme.
Intuitively,
 Given two requests with the same priority, the one
asking for a small size data with minimum deadline
should be served first.
We have used four values to the request priorities. A
normal request shall have P=0. In other cases, P can be 1,
2 or 3. A accidental help request shall have P=1. A request
with P=2 means a possibility of emergency. A P=3 means
a requests for alerts or warnings. We shall try to find out
the arrival frequency of different types of messages and
try to queue them in different queues based on the priori-
ty and finally schedule the transmission to increase the
service ratio.
4 SIMULATION SETUP
This section describes the simulation of Priority Based
data scheduling. The simulation has been done using si-
mulator NCTUns 6.0 [2].
Each vehicle generates requests and sends to the roadside
unit (RSU) with 5-tuples in the request. The proposed
scheduling scheme is simulated on a 400 m*400 m square
road scenario. One RSU server is put at the crossing roads
of the area. It is also the intersection of one horizontal
road and one vertical road, where road has two lanes as
shown in Figure 2.
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TABLE 2
SIMULATION PARAMETERS

Parameter Value

Simulation Time 100s

Vehicle-Vehicle Space 10-20m

Vehicle Velocity 0 – 60 m/s

Wireless Coverage 200m

Packet Size 1024 bytes

Data Item size 25 KB

Fig.2. The simulation scenario layout 
To simulate the vehicle traffic, we randomly deploy 40
vehicles initially. All vehicles move towards either end of
the road. They are moving forth and back during the si-
mulation to mimic the continuous traffic flow in the inter-
section area.
When one vehicle reaches the end of the road, which
means the vehicle will move out of the RSU area, its re-
quest not serviced will be dropped. Each vehicle issues
service requests with a priority P, (0≤ P ≤ 3).
When one vehicle is served or reaching the end of the
road, it waits some time to issue a new request. The inter-
arrival time of each request follows an exponential distri-
bution with a mean of λ. Its density function is:
f(t) = λe−λt
The simulation parameters are listed in Table 2.
All requests are queued at the RSU; served upon arrival.
Based on the scheduling algorithm, the server serves one
request and removes it from the request queue.
Routing Protocol DSR
Ratio Proportional Model Two Ray Ground
Antenna Model Omni Antenna
Mac Type 802.11
Traffic Type CBR(UDP)
earlier work, and then select the smallest one with the
highest priority based on the value in the P-list. Here also
we consider the same data structure as in [16] to reduce
the computation complexity to O(logm). A large number
of vehicles retrieve (or upload) their data from (or to) the
RSU when they are in the communication range. The RSU
(server) maintains a service cycle, which is non-
preemptive; i.e., one service cannot be interrupted until it
finishes. When one vehicle enters the RSU area, it listens
to the wireless channel. All vehicles can send requests to
the RSU if they want to access the data.

5 SERVICE RATIO
The service ratio evaluation is based on the possibility of
as many requests that can be served. It can also be termed
as throughput of the algorithm. We have analyzed the
service ratio of both the scheduling algorithms. The graph
on X-axis has the simulation time. The comparison is be-
tween D*S and D*S/P. Therefore, the result shows that
the service ratio is improved when considering the priori-
ty of the requests.

Figure 3 shows the comparison of service ratio of D*S and

D*S/P scheduling algorithms. In this figure, we are com-
paring requests using priority and requests not using
priority.
6 SIMULATION RESULTS
A straightforward implementation of the D * S/P scheme
is to compute the DS_values of all requests as done in
Fig.3. Service Ratio of D*S and D*S/P
7 CONCLUSION
This paper primarily focuses on scheduling the requests
in an optimize manner. We addressed some challenges in
vehicle roadside data access. We proposed a priority based
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scheduling scheme called D* S/P to consider both service
deadline and data size along with priority when making
scheduling decisions. These requests are queued in dif-
ferent combinations of priorities to apply the scheduling
algorithm. Once the combinations are applied, the request
with the highest priority is served first. Simulation results
show that the scheduling scheme performs better in com-
parison to other scheduling schemes. Further, the sche-
duling scheme is adaptive to different workload scena-
rios.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors wish to thank Mohammad Bilal, Mobile and
Satellite Communications Research Centre, School of In-
formatics, University of Bradford, BRADFORD, (UK) for
his cooperation in conducting the simulation.
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AUTHORS PROFILE
Vishal Kumar is a research scholar (M.Tech)
in Department of Computer Science &
Engineering at National Institute of
Technology, Hamirpur, India. He received his
Bachelor of Engineering in Computer
Science & Engineering from Kumaon
Engineering College, Dwarahat (Almora),
India in 2005. His area of interest is vehicular
ad-hoc networks. He has published several
papers in National/ International conferences.
Dr. Narottam Chand is an Associate
Professor & Head in Department of Computer
Science & Engineering at National Institute of
Technology, Hamirpur, India. He received his
PhD degree from IIT Roorkee in Computer
Science and Engineering. Previously he re-
ceived M. Tech and B. Tech degrees in Com-
puter Science and Engineering from IIT Delhi
and NIT Hamirpur respectively. His current research areas of interest
include mobile computing, mobile ad hoc networks and wireless
sensor networks. He has published more than 50 research papers in
International/National journals & conferences and guiding six PhDs
in these areas. He is a member of ISTE, CSI, International Associa-
tion of Engineers and Internet Society.