Improving the Uplink Performance of Drive-Thru Internet via Platoon-Based Cooperative Retransmission

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

For many vehicular safety applications, it is critical to timely and reliably deliver multimedia data from a traveling vehicle to a roadside access point (AP) in an error-prone vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), which is a typical uplink scenario for drive-thru Internet. To achieve this goal, we propose a cooperative retransmission scheme that exploits a common phenomenon in reality, in which consecutive vehicles can naturally form a platoon to reduce energy consumption. We develop a 4-D Markov chain to model the proposed scheme and analyze the uplink throughput of drive-thru Internet, which also reveals some fundamental relationships among traffic flow, platoon parameters, and system throughput. We conduct extensive simulation in OMNeT++ to validate our scheme and the analytical model. Numerical results show that the proposed platoon-based cooperative retransmission scheme significantly improves the uplink throughput of drive-thru Internet, considerably decreases the total transmission times for a given quantity of upload data, and, hence, achieves a greener mobile multimedia communication.