A Social-based Data Forwarding Mechanism for V2V Communication in VANETs

In order to deliver messages between moving vehicles in cities, this paper proposes a Social-based Data Forwarding Mechanism (SDFM) for V2V communication in VANETs. The SDFM learns vehicles' social characteristics in a distributed manner, and then transfers messages in a "Store-Carry-Forward" pattern. SDFM describes the sociality of a vehicle as centrality and community. Based on these two metrics, for each message, a vehicle forwards it to the vehicle with higher global centrality than itself till it meets a vehicle within the same community as the message's final destination, and then forwards the message to the vehicle with higher local centrality till it is finally delivered. The SDFM calculates vehicles' centralities by computing the mobile entropies of vehicles, and determines vehicles' communities by adopting a distributed K-Clique algorithm on recorded inter-meeting time as well as meeting frequencies between vehicles. Experimental results show that, for civic moving vehicles, SDFM mechanism has significantly improved the message delivery ratio and the average delivery delay performances when compared with a social based routing protocol bubble rap which is designed for data forwarding in packet switch networks.