Vehicle Assisted Data Update for Temporal Information Service in Vehicular Networks

Vehicular networks blueprint the bright future of transportation systems in safety, efficiency and sustainability. Highly dynamic traffic information is one of the most important features in vehicular networks, which makes data services very challenging, as the data quality drops over time dramatically and timely data update is expected to maintain the service quality. In this paper, we consider the system architecture, in which vehicles coming from different directions are able to sense and carry upto-date location-based information along their trajectories and upload fresh information to the roadside unit (RSU) when passing through. Meanwhile, vehicles may request information from the RSU for other routes. To enable efficient data services in such a scenario, firstly, we characterize the freshness of temporal data. Then, based on the general form of data quality function, we propose a heuristic algorithm called priority-based scheduling (PBS), which synthesizes the data quality, the broadcast effect and the real-time service requirement in making scheduling decisions. A comprehensive performance evaluation demonstrates the superiorty of PBS under a variety of scenarios.