A Framework for Network Utility Maximization in VANETs

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are expected to have great potential to improve both traffic safety and comfort in the future. Safety and traffic related applications will typically use broadcast-based communication schemes to disseminate messages within the network. Existing strategies to reduce redundant retransmissions and to improve reliability and efficiency of message dissemination rely on inflexible transmission limitations.They are not adequate to efficiently deal with the limited network resources efficiently both in
sparse and in dense networks. Apart from that, they do not take into account the individual network nodes' interest in information. The goal of our concept is to provide network participants with data that has the highest utility for them with a latency as small as possible, independent of the actual network load. Our concept envisages the context-adaptive differentiation of data traffic according to current information relevance to allow for an optimal utilization of the limited
network resources. In this paper, we propose methodologies for quantifying message relevance, present different mechanisms for realizing data prioritization and compare our solution with the IEEE 802.11e approach.

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