Performance Boundaries of Massive Floating Car Data Offloading

Floating Car Data (FCD) consist of information generated by moving vehicles and uploaded to Internet-based control centers for processing and analysis. As upcoming mobile services based on or built for networked vehicles largely rely on uplink transfers of small-sized but high-frequency messages, FCD traffic is expected to become increasingly common in the next few years. Presently, FCD are managed through a traditional cellular network paradigm: however, the scalability of such a model is unclear in the face of massive FCD upload, involving large fractions of the vehicles over short time intervals. In this paper, we explore the use of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication to partially relieve the cellular infrastructure from FCD traffic. Specifically, we study the performance boundaries of such a FCD offloading approach in presence of best-and worst-case data aggregation possibilities at vehicles. We show the gain that can be obtained by offloading FCD via vehicular communication, and propose a simple distributed heuristic that has nearly optimal performance under any FCD aggregation model.