On Piggybacking in Vehicular Networks

This paper is motivated by network applications that require nodes to disseminate their state to others. In particular, vehicular nodes will host applications that periodically disseminate time-critical state across the network to help improve on-road safety. In this paper, the authors want to minimize the average age of state information that a node observes from any other node in networks with hundreds to thousands of nodes. They explore the benefits, vis-a-vis reducing age, of a multi-hop wireless network over a fully-connected one, for a physical network of on-road vehicles, by allowing nodes to piggyback other nodes' states.