Impact of Asymmetric Traffic Densities on Delay Tolerant Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular networking can be achieved with short, medium, or long-range communication technologies. However, there are trade-offs in the adoption of these technologies including data capacity, continuity of connections, energy use and contention with other users. The authors focus on short range technologies that support both near-neighbor communication, for safety applications, and multi-hop communications for message propagation. Due to frequent network partitioning, opportunistic message exchange is required for message propagation. Earlier studies reveal that messages are suitably propagated in both directions of traffic as vehicle traffic density increases. In this paper, they consider asymmetries in traffic density caused by directionality.