On the performances of forwarding multihop unicast traffic in WBSS-based 802.11(p)/1609 networks

The IEEE 802.11(p)/1609 network is a promising candidate for future vehicular communication networks. In this new network, the operation of a new Wave Basic Service set (WBSS) is defined for vehicular environments. Due to the deployment cost consideration, roadside units (RSUs) in such networks are usually installed only at hot spots and intersections, causing the service coverage of RSUs to be discontinuous. To overcome this problem, multihop data forwarding among vehicles can be used to extend the service coverage of RSUs. The multihop geocasting problem has been studied and addressed in our previous work [1], where we proposed a receiver-centric WBSS geocasting scheme to increase multihop geocasting performances in WBSS-based networks. However, multihop unicasting, a more common facility in many network applications and services, was not dealt with in [1]. In this paper, we propose a new Receiver-centric WBSS Forwarding Scheme for Unicast traffic (called RWFS-U), which uses a prioritized receiver-centric WBSS creation design to efficiently support unicast data forwarding in WBSS-based networks. Extensive performance evaluations using both analyses and simulations are presented to understand the effects of the designs of WBSS forwarding schemes on the goodputs of end-to-end flows. Our results show that RWFS-U can significantly outperform the traditional sender-centric schemes on multihop unicasting in WBSS-based networks.