UAV-Assisted Data Dissemination Scheduling in VANETs

In high-speed vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), cooperative data dissemination is an effective solution to amend the limited connection time of communication links between roadside units (RSUs) and vehicles. Existing data dissemination strategies utilize efficient cooperation of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication links to maintain the data transmissions and thus improve the system performance. Recently, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is widely utilized in communication systems, which has a high probability of line-of-sight (LoS) links with better channel quality and can be dynamically deployed. In this paper, we propose a novel UAV-assisted data dissemination scheduling strategy in VANETs. The recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm is utilized to predict the vehicle mobility with low complexity and high prediction accuracy. To enhance the transmission utilities of the UAVs, we further propose a maximum vehicle coverage (MVC) algorithm to schedule the two-dimensional (2D) movements of the UAVs during the process of data dissemination. Simulations in both urban and highway scenarios verify that the proposed UAV-assisted data dissemination strategy achieves a significant reduction of data dissemination delay and an improvement of system throughput.