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Efficient Data Scheduling in VANETs

Vishal Kumar, Narottam Chand

Abstract— This paper primarily focuses on scheduling the requests in an optimize manner. We address some challenges in
vehicle roadside data access. We propose a priority based scheduling scheme called D* S/P to consider both service deadline
and data size along with priority when making scheduling decisions. These requests are queued in different combinations of
priorities to apply the scheduling algorithm. Once the combinations are applied, the request with the highest priority is served
first. Simulation results show that the scheduling scheme performs better in comparison to other scheduling schemes. Further,
the scheduling scheme is adaptive to different workload scenarios.

Index Terms— Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), RSU, scheduling, queue.

——————————  ——————————

1 INTRODUCTION

W ITH the increase in the number of vehicles the pos-

sibility of accidents has also increased. Therefore it
is required to make such a system which could
Currently, most existing data scheduling techniques con-
sider only two parameters data size and deadline in-
volved in vehicle ad-hoc networks [14, 15]. Their main
help in reducing the possibilities of accidents. A vehicular focus is on specific elements involved in the communica-
ad-hoc network (VANET) is an effort towards this which tion, such as medium access, vehicle mobility, traffic flow,
adds ability in the vehicles to communicate each other routing, etc. The challenges for VANETs raise the de-
(V2V) or with the infrastructure (V2I). A lot of work has mand for a more perfect data dissemination technique.
been done to address data dissemination issues in vehicu- The goal of this paper is to schedule the data efficiently
lar ad hoc networks (VANETs). Broadly there are two by considering parameters like deadline, data size and
approaches when we consider V2I or I2V dissemination; priority of the request. To do this, the following problems
push based and pull based approach. In the push based are addressed:
approach [4, 5, 19] the info-stations also called roadside
units push out the data to everyone. This approach has its 1. First, it is essential to be thoroughly familiar with
application in disseminating traffic alerts, weather alert, the characteristics of vehicular ad-hoc networks.
etc. The pull based approach [4, 8, 9] is based on request- Thus, the initial task is to analyze data dissemi-
response model as this is based on user specific data. Re- nation techniques, routing and scheduling ap-
cently, vehicle-roadside data access has received consi- proaches used in vehicular networks.
derable attention. In vehicle-roadside data access, the
RSU can act as a router for vehicles to access the internet. 2. The second challenge is to consider the existing
Although this can bring many benefits to the drivers, the data scheduling techniques in vehicular ad-hoc
deployment cost and maintenance cost are very high. As network. It means to deal how to schedule the
another option, RSU can also be just used as a buffer data in high mobile environment so as to serve as
point (or data island) between vehicles. In this thesis we many requests as possible. Thus, we have to ana-
focus on the scheduling of the data at these data centers lyze existing data scheduling techniques of VA-
or RSUs. In this paradigm, all data on the RSUs are up- NETs.
loaded or downloaded by vehicles.
Many different and sometimes competing design goals 3. Third challenge is to analyze the different factors
have to be taken into account for VANETs to ensure their which are considered in existing data scheduling
commercial success. When equipped with WAVE (Wire- techniques of VANETs. In this way determine
less Access in Vehicular Environment), forms a highly the factors which should be included in existing
dynamic network. Due to this dynamic nature, the ve- techniques to schedule the data efficiently.
hicles requests to be serviced create a time limitation. Our
work aims at prioritizing and scheduling of the requests 4. Fourth challenge is to apply additional feature
arriving at the data center in vehicular ad-hoc network. like priority to the existing scheme for better
scheduling in VANETs. Then determine how
———————————————— much improvement has got after adding these
 Vishal Kumar is with the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, additional features.  
National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, INDIA-177005.
 Dr. Narottam Chand is with the Department of Computer Science & Engi-
neering, National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, INDIA-177005.  
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Based  on  the  above  mentioned  challenges,  we  have  pro‐ ted QCs. This work is also based on point-to-point com-
posed the following: munication and does not take advantage of broadcasting.
  All these works mainly focus on responsiveness such as
 A new scheme called D*S/P which considers da- average/worst- case waiting time or fairness without
ta size, request deadline and priority of the re- considering the time constraints of the user requests.
quests to be served.
 Study the frequency of various messages based However, in vehicular networks, time constraint of the
on the priority assigned to the messages. request has to be considered. Jiang and Vaidya [10], Rajan
 Simulation to study the performance of the pro- et al. [17] and Xu et al. [18] studied the scheduling prob-
posed scheduling scheme. lem in real-time broadcasting environment and took time
 Compare the proposed scheme with existing constraint into account. The authors in [18] investigated
online scheduling algorithms for time critical on- demand
scheme.
data broadcast. However, they ignored the data update
issue. They assumed that data are read only or can only
Several mobile computing systems such as MobiEyes and
be updated by the server. Hence, they only tried to im-
CarTel [20] were designed and implemented by UCLA
prove the service ratio for download broadcasting. In con-
and MIT, respectively to collect process and deliver data
trast, our vehicle-roadside data access model is different
from sensors located on vehicles to roadside infrastruc-
as both update and download compete for the same
tures for analysis. The similar projects include the Di-
bandwidth. Also, missing the update degrades the data
eselNet at Umass [25], FleetNet in Germany [19], Inter- quality.
netCAR in Japan [21]. Vehicles are moving at a high
speed and they stay in the area of roadside units only for The authors in [1] gave the first understanding of the im-
a short period of time. Therefore scheduling of data is pact of the vehicle’s speed, transmission rate, 802.11 bit-
very crucial so as to serve as much requests as possible, rate, and packet size on throughput and delay of vehicle-
reducing delay of downloading etc. Scheduling is an im- roadside communication and illustrated a basic picture of
portant issue for data access in vehicular environment. In how running vehicles contact with roadside hot spots
the next section, we shall study the work related to the through a “drive-thru” data access. In various earlier
scheduling for vehicle-roadside data access. works deadline constraints of the requests were not con-
sidered. However, some works took into account dead-
2 RELATED WORK line for some requests and found that the requests shall
be dropped completely if vehicles move out from the RSU
Earlier a large amount of work related to CPU and job area. In this case if the request is urgent shall not be
scheduling is done in the literature. Wong studied several served and dropped.
scheduling algorithms such as first-come-first-serve
(FCFS), longest wait time (LWT), most requests first The authors in [15] proposed a basic scheduling scheme
(MRF) in the broadcasting environments [9]. Later, many called D*S to consider both deadline and data size when
broadcast scheduling algorithms have been proposed to making scheduling decisions. To make use of wireless
reduce the waiting time and energy consumption [17]. broadcasting, the authors gave another scheduling
Acharya and Muthukrishnan [11] addressed the broad- scheme called D*S/N to serve multiple requests with a
cast scheduling problem in heterogeneous environments, single broadcast. The authors also identified the effects of
where data items have different sizes. The solution is upload requests on data quality, and proposed a Two-
based on a new metric called Stretch, defined as the ratio step scheduling scheme to provide a balance between
of the response time of a request to its service time. Based serving download and upload requests. They have com-
on stretch, they proposed a scheduling algorithm, called pared the three naive schemes; FCFS, FDF and SDF and
longest total stretch first (LTSF) to optimize the stretch showed their performance and limitations. In [15] authors
and achieve a balance between the worst case and the proposed a scheduling algorithm in which each file is
average case. However, a straightforward implementa- chopped in several segments. If a vehicle shall not be able
tion of LTSF is not practical for a large system, as at each to finish downloading all segments from the RSU then the
broadcast time, the server has to recalculate the total algorithm allows the vehicle to continue downloading the
stretch for every data item with pending requests in order segments from the next RSU. The authors have also inves-
to decide which data to broadcast next, and hence the tigated the problems of scheduling of file distribution
scheduling algorithm becomes a bottleneck due to the from roadside unit (RSU) to the vehicle in the urban envi-
high computation overhead. The work in [12] introduced ronment. The work in [15] considers the parameters given
the concept of Quality Contracts (QCs) which combines in [16].
the two incomparable performance metrics: response time
or Quality of Service (QoS), and staleness or Quality of We consider the problem of providing or reducing the
Data (QoD). QCs allow individual users to express their delay to those requests which needs to be served imme-
preferences for the expected QoS and QoD of their que- diately. We build our strategy on previous work in this
ries by assigning “profit” values. They proposed an adap- area [15, 16]. We are proposing our scheme that shall con-
tive algorithm to maximize the total profit from submit- sider priority and serves the requests with priority first
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otherwise the scheme behaves similar to the scheme pro- TABLE 1

posed by [15]. In this paper, we have studied the applica- POSSIBLE VALUES OF P
tion-layer scheduling for vehicle-roadside data access. We
P Meaning
propose and implement our scheme at the application
layer and call it D*S/P. 0 Normal

1 Accidental
3 PRIORITY BASED DATA SCHEDULING (D*S/P) 2 Possibility of Emergency
All vehicles can send requests to the RSU if they want to 3 Warning/Alerts
access the data. Each request is characterized by a 5-tuple:
2. The second list called S-List (dataSize-list) is used
<v-id, d-id, op, deadline, r-priority>, to record the size (S value) of the data item that is
asked by the request. S-List is sorted in ascending
where v-id is the identifier of the vehicle, d-id is the iden- order of the data size.
tifier of the requested data item, op is the operation that
the vehicle wants to do (upload or download), deadline is 3. The third list called P-list (Priority-list) is used to
the critical time constraint of the request, beyond which record the priority of the request.
the service becomes useless and r-priority is the priority
sent with the request according to the message type. Algorithm Implementation of D*S/P:

1. The requests arrive at the RSU.

2. The tuples of the request are read which consist

of parameters including priority.

Vehicle request data 3. The P parameter is evaluated if its value lies be-
tween 0 ≤ P≤ 3, then the request is specially
treated on priority.
Is 0≤P ≤ 3
4. Otherwise, the algorithm runs similar to the D*S
scheduling scheme.

P-list D-list S-list Intuitively,

 Given two requests with the same priority, the one
asking for a small size data with minimum deadline
should be served first.

We have used four values to the request priorities. A

normal request shall have P=0. In other cases, P can be 1,
2 or 3. A accidental help request shall have P=1. A request
with P=2 means a possibility of emergency. A P=3 means
a requests for alerts or warnings. We shall try to find out
the arrival frequency of different types of messages and
Service Processing
try to queue them in different queues based on the priori-
ty and finally schedule the transmission to increase the
service ratio.

Fig.1. Flowchart of D*S/P scheme 

4 SIMULATION SETUP
This section describes the simulation of Priority Based
The proposed scheduling algorithm maintains the sorted data scheduling. The simulation has been done using si-
list each for deadline (D), data size (S) and priority (P). mulator NCTUns 6.0 [2].
These three lists are as follows:
Each vehicle generates requests and sends to the roadside
unit (RSU) with 5-tuples in the request. The proposed
1. One list called D-List (Deadline-list) is used to scheduling scheme is simulated on a 400 m*400 m square
record the deadline (D value) of each request. D- road scenario. One RSU server is put at the crossing roads
List is ordered by the increasing deadline of each of the area. It is also the intersection of one horizontal
request. road and one vertical road, where road has two lanes as
shown in Figure 2.
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TABLE 2
SIMULATION PARAMETERS

Parameter Value

Simulation Time 100s

Vehicle-Vehicle Space 10-20m

Vehicle Velocity 0 – 60 m/s

Wireless Coverage 200m

Packet Size 1024 bytes

Data Item size 25 KB

Fig.2. The simulation scenario layout 
Routing Protocol DSR
To simulate the vehicle traffic, we randomly deploy 40 Ratio Proportional Model Two Ray Ground
vehicles initially. All vehicles move towards either end of
the road. They are moving forth and back during the si- Antenna Model Omni Antenna
mulation to mimic the continuous traffic flow in the inter-
section area. Mac Type 802.11
When one vehicle reaches the end of the road, which
Traffic Type CBR(UDP)
means the vehicle will move out of the RSU area, its re-
quest not serviced will be dropped. Each vehicle issues
earlier work, and then select the smallest one with the
service requests with a priority P, (0≤ P ≤ 3). highest priority based on the value in the P-list. Here also
we consider the same data structure as in [16] to reduce
When one vehicle is served or reaching the end of the the computation complexity to O(logm). A large number
road, it waits some time to issue a new request. The inter- of vehicles retrieve (or upload) their data from (or to) the
arrival time of each request follows an exponential distri- RSU when they are in the communication range. The RSU
bution with a mean of λ. Its density function is: (server) maintains a service cycle, which is non-
preemptive; i.e., one service cannot be interrupted until it
f(t) = λe−λt finishes. When one vehicle enters the RSU area, it listens
to the wireless channel. All vehicles can send requests to
The simulation parameters are listed in Table 2. the RSU if they want to access the data.
All requests are queued at the RSU; served upon arrival.
Based on the scheduling algorithm, the server serves one
request and removes it from the request queue.

5 SERVICE RATIO
The service ratio evaluation is based on the possibility of
as many requests that can be served. It can also be termed
as throughput of the algorithm. We have analyzed the
service ratio of both the scheduling algorithms. The graph
on X-axis has the simulation time. The comparison is be-
tween D*S and D*S/P. Therefore, the result shows that
the service ratio is improved when considering the priori-
ty of the requests.

Figure 3 shows the comparison of service ratio of D*S and

D*S/P scheduling algorithms. In this figure, we are com-
paring requests using priority and requests not using Fig.3. Service Ratio of D*S and D*S/P
priority.
7 CONCLUSION
6 SIMULATION RESULTS This paper primarily focuses on scheduling the requests
A straightforward implementation of the D * S/P scheme in an optimize manner. We addressed some challenges in
is to compute the DS_values of all requests as done in vehicle roadside data access. We proposed a priority based
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scheduling scheme called D* S/P to consider both service [15] M. Shahverdy, M. Fathy, S. Yousefi, “Scheduling Algorithm for
Vehicle to Roadside Data Distribution,” ICHCC-ICTMF 2009,
deadline and data size along with priority when making China, Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS
scheduling decisions. These requests are queued in dif- Book Series), Vol. 66, pp. 30-38, Springer Verlag Berlin
ferent combinations of priorities to apply the scheduling Heidelberg, 2010.
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Data Access,” in Proceedings of the fourth ACM international
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show that the scheduling scheme performs better in com- 18, 2007.
parison to other scheduling schemes. Further, the sche- [17] T. Nadeem, P. Shankar and L. Iftode “A Comparative Study of
duling scheme is adaptive to different workload scena- Data Dissemination Models for VANETs,”in Proceedings  of  the 
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT [18] Kevin  C.  Lee,  Uichin  Lee,  Mario  Gerla,  “  Survey  of  Routing 
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The authors wish to thank Mohammad Bilal, Mobile and hicular Ad‐Hoc Networks: Developments and Challenges, IGI Global, 
Satellite Communications Research Centre, School of In- Oct, 2009. 
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[21] “Internet ITS,” http://www.internetits.org.
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1, pp. 3–14, Jan. 2006. Vishal Kumar is a research scholar (M.Tech)
[7] D. Rajan, A. Sabharwal, B. Aazhang, “Power Efficient Broadcast in Department of Computer Science &
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tion of Engineers and Internet Society.
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