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RSU-Assisted Geocast in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Article in IEEE Wireless Communications · February 2017

DOI: 10.1109/MWC.2017.1600192WC

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 A rchitecture for N ext G eneration W ireless N etworks :
S calability , F lexibilty , and I nteroperability
RSU-Assisted Geocast in
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks
Peng Li, Tao Zhang, Chuanhe Huang, Xi Chen, and Bin Fu
Abstract
Geocast, delivering a message to nodes within
a geographical region, is an important issue in
VANETs. In this article, we address the geocast
problem in VANETs. Given a piece of a message,
we must find the minimal cost to relay the mes-
sage to a specific vehicle in a given geographical
area. To solve this problem, we propose an RSU
RAG approach for VANETs. We use a quadtree
model that represents a hierarchical decompo-
sition of the global region. Then we propose a
tree trimming approach to search the intersection
between the destination area and the quadtree.
Based on the quadtree model, we propose an
election approach that selects an optimal RSU to
forward the message to the destination area. The-
oretical analysis is given about the complexity to
search the quadtree. Extensive simulations show
that the performance of our proposed method is
superior to other approaches.
Introduction
Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have recent-
ly attracted a lot of attention. In VANETs, geo-
cast is a task of sending a message from a source
node to a specific location, which is important for
many applications, including accident warning,
geographic advertising, and so on. The design of
reliable and efficient geocast protocols is essen-
tial for such applications in VANETs. The tradi-
tional geocast protocols applied in the area of
ad hoc networks are divided into two categories,
non-flooding approaches and flooding approach-
es [1]. However, neither of them is suitable for
VANETs for the following reasons: First, non-flood-
ing approaches require a fixed network or net-
work topology information, neither of which is
well implemented as the nodes move fast and
network topology changes quickly in VANETs.
Second, the communication mode (e.g., vehi-
cle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-infrastructure) is differ-
ent from ad hoc networks, and vehicle movement
has some certain mobility pattern such as trajecto-
ry-based mobility. Without considering the com-
munication mode and the mobility patterns, the
flooding approaches cause tremendous overhead
in VANETs. Third, the previous approaches do not
consider using roadside units (RSUs) to help geo-
cast, which is more efficient in vehicular networks.
In VANETs, a vehicle can communicate with
IEEE Wireless Communications • February 2017
other vehicles either directly, if they are within
each other’s transmission range, or through RSUs
otherwise. These units are wireless nodes with
store-and-forward capabilities placed along vehi-
cles’ routes that exchange data with vehicles that
pass through the node. Therefore, they increase
the probability of connectivity in the network and
improve the overall network performance. Mean-
while, forwarding schemes can be efficient with
considering vehicles mobility patterns, such as
trajectory-based mobility or social-aware mobil-
ity. There are some approaches that exploit the
vehicle’s mobility pattern and the RSU-assisted
routing or geocasting [2–4]. However, most tra-
jectory-based approaches do not consider privacy
protection for exchanging trajectory information
between vehicles. Even vehicles do not release
their trajectories to other vehicles for privacy
concerns in RSU-assisted routing, they release
their trajectory to RSUs or a traffic control center
(TCC). In practice, most users will not input the
destination information if they are familiar with
the road paths. Thus, the previous approaches are
difficult to implement in practical applications.
In this article, we study the geocast problem
in VANETs. Given a piece of a message and a
specific area, find a minimum cost to relay the
information such that the message is delivered
to a given vehicle within the specific area. As
the delay of sending the message through the
fixed RSU network is much less than through the
VANETs, we use RSUs to help geocast for the
basic motivation. Meanwhile, we do not need the
vehicle to input its trajectory information based
on consideration of privacy protection. Therefore,
the approach is easier to achieve in practice. Our Peng Li is with Wuhan
problem is different from the previous geocast University of Science and
Technology and the Hubei
work in the following aspects: Province Key Laboratory of
• We consider RSU-assisted geocast, and our sys- Intelligent Information
tem does not need users to input their trajecto- Processing and Real-time
ry information. Industrial System.
• We consider minimal cost information dissemi- Tao Zhang is with New York
nation, which is desirable for many applications Institute of Technology.
in vehicular networks.
The main contributions of this article are as fol- Chuanhe Huang and Xi Chen
are with Wuhan University.
lows:
• We propose a quadtree model that uses a Bin Fu is with the University
quadtree to represent a hierarchical decompo- of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
sition of the global region. Then we propose a
tree trimming approach to get the intersection Digital Object Identifier:
between the destination area and the quadtree. 10.1109/MWC.2017.1600192WC
1536-1284/17/$25.00 © 2017 IEEE 53

s et al. [4] exploited the RSUs and relay nodes for
(a) (b)
Figure 1. System model: a) the region area; b) the region division.
• Based on the quadtree model, we propose an
election approach that selects an optimal RSU
to forward the message to the destination area.
Meanwhile, we give a case study about the tree
trimming approach to search the quadtree.
• We conduct an extensive simulation over differ-
ent traffic data to evaluate the performance of
the proposed methods. Simulation results show
that the methods can significantly reduce the
total cost, compared to other geocast methods.
The rest of this article is organized as follows.
Previous studies are summarized in the following
section. We then present the system model and
the problem. Following that we give a detailed
description of our geocast algorithms. Then we
evaluate our proposed approach by comparing it
in different environments. We conclude this arti-
cle in the final section.
Related work
Nowadays, there are many algorithms for data
delivery, message dissemination, multicast, and
geocast routing protocols in VANETs [5–9].
Zhu et al. [5] found that pairwise contacts have
strong temporal correlation, and they exploited
the mobility patterns to help data delivery. Li and
Wang [6] considered spatial and temporal limits
of geocast, and they defined the dissemination
distance and hitting time in geocast. Based on
the definition, they derived the lower and upper
bounds for the distance and time. Jiang et al. pro-
posed TMC [7] and CAG [8], which considered
vehicular trajectory to help multicast or geocast
routing. Zhang et al. [9] focused on bus-based
VANETs, and they exploited the bus trajectories
to geocast.
The work in [2, 10–12] is about RSU-assisted
routing, data scheduling, and advertisement dis-
semination. Wu et al. [2] investigated the optimal
infrastructure-assisted routing for inter-vehicle data
delivery. They considered the packet forwarding
and buffer allocation problem and designed a
global algorithm to solve the optimization prob-
lem. Liu et al. [10] studied the cooperative data
scheduling problem, and proved that the cooper-
ative data scheduling problem was NP-hard. Then
they proposed several algorithms to solve it. Li et
al. [11] considered the problem of data replica-
tion for RSU-aided vehicular networks. They for-
mulated the problem as an optimization problem
and proposed a heuristic algorithm to solve the
54
problem. Zheng et al. [12] not only studied the
mobile advertising problem, but also maximized
the RSU placement problem to attract potential
customers.
There is some recent work on RSU-assisted
geocast [3, 4, 13]. Zhang et al. [13] exploited
bus and taxi mobility patterns to help geocast.
The work in [3, 4] is closely related to our prob-
lem. Mershad et al. [3] exploited the infrastruc-
ture of RSUs to efficiently and reliably deliver
messages to distant vehicles. However, they did
not consider privacy protection for exchanging
trajectory information between vehicles. Jeong
efficient data delivery in vehicle networks. They
considered privacy protection and released the
trajectory information to a traffic central serv-
er. However, there is no traffic central server in
many suburbs. For that reason, we exploit RSUs
to help geocasting while considering privacy pro-
tection without using a central server. Also, there
is some work about quadtree-based or octree-
based methods [14, 15] in VANETs. Li et al. [14]
proposed a grid-based duplicate address detec-
tion (GDAD) scheme with a quadtree-based
method in VANETs. Kumar et al. [15] used an
octree to represent different regions in the world.
However, they did not exploit a quadtree-based
method to geocast routing. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first work that exploits RSUs
and quadtree to perform efficient geocast in the
literature.
System Model and
Problem Formulation
In this section, we present the quadtree model
to efficiently represent the whole region. Then
we state the communication model and problem
formulation.
Assumption
In the system, we assume that RSUs have been
deployed in advance. RSUs are interconnected
by wired lines, which are gateways integrating
the vehicular network and wired network. Each
RSU has dedicated short-range communications
(DSRC), storage, and processing capability to for-
ward messages to vehicles. Vehicles are equipped
with onboard units (OBUs). The vehicles can
communicate with RSUs and other vehicles by
OBUs. Therefore, there are two communication
modes: one is vehicle-to-vehicle communication
(V2V), and the other is vehicle-to-RSU communi-
cation (V2R). As shown in Fig. 1a there are some
RSUs deployed in a region, and a source vehicle s
wants to send a message to the specific vehicle in
the given dark green area. The problem is how to
efficiently transmit to the destination at low cost
as fast as possible.
We assume that the region has an intrinsic par-
tition based on geography position. We do not
require that the region division be uniform, but in
accordance with the intrinsic characteristics of the
geographical position. The partition granularity
is small for some hotspots while large for some
less popular areas. As shown in Fig. 1b, we divide
the region into squares recursively. The south-
eastern corner of the region is less popular, so it
does not have a sub-region. Note that if there is
IEEE Wireless Communications • February 2017
no deployed RSU in a region, we will not further
divide the region.
Quadtree Model
To efficiently represent this region, we use a
quadtree model. The definition of quadtree is as
follows.
Definition 1: A quadtree T represents a region.
The root refers to the whole region, and it has
four children. The four children are clockwise to
the four sub-regions, respectively. Each child of
the node is either a sub-quadtree or a leaf.
In order to explain the quadtree structure,
we use different colors to represent the different
regions. As shown in Fig. 2, we use red to refer to
the first level of the four nodes. The root has four
red children in the quadtree. Then we use green
to refer to the second level of nodes. Note that
the southeastern corner of the region is not divid-
ed into a sub-region, so it does not have a child.
In the third level, we use blue, and we can see
that there are only three regions that have been
divided into sub-regions. In the end, we use the
yellow color to refer to the fourth level of nodes.
Therefore, we build a quadtree to represent the
whole region. Note that we do not ensure that
each region has an RSU. The RSUs only need
to know their own regions. They do not have to
know their parent region division. If there is no
RSU in some region, the region must be a leaf
node. Thus, for all non-leaf nodes of the region,
there must be an RSU. We assume that each RSU
has a unique identification number. For all the
non-leaf nodes, we select a gateway RSU to rep-
resent the non-leaf node.
Vehicle-to-RSU Communication Model
To reduce the system overhead, we do not need
each vehicle to periodically send hello pack-
ets to its neighbors as our geocast is an on-de-
mand-based protocol. Different from [3], we only
assume that the vehicles and RSUs communicate
with each other when the vehicles are in commu-
nication range of an RSU.
When vehicle i meets an RSU, vehicle i sends
a hello packet V i(vid, v, din, dout, rid, t), where
vid is the unique identifier of the vehicle, v is the
instantaneous speed of vehicle, din is the direc-
tion of the vehicle toward the RSU, dout is the
direction of the vehicle leaving the RSU, rid is the
RSU identifier when the vehicle meets the RSU
for the last time, and t is the current system time-
stamp. As the RSUs are usually deployed at the
intersection, we set four direction vectors (north,
south, west, east) for the system. If the system has
more directions, we could set more directions.
As RSU j receives the hello packet from Vi, it
sends acknowledgment packet R j(rid, long, lat,
regid) to vehicle i, where rid is the unique iden-
tifier of the RSU, long and lat are the longitude
and latitude of the RSU’s location, and regid is the
unique identifier of the region.
Each vehicle maintains an RSU list, Lr, which is
updated as follows: When vehicle i meets a new
RSU j, it adds the Rj(rid, long, lat, regid) to list Lr.
Due to the fixed position of the RSUs, we do not
delete the entries of list Lr. After that, each vehicle
knows its visited RSUs’ locations.
Each RSU maintains a vehicle list L v and a
RSU-to-vehicle list Lr2v. Lv is updated as follows:
IEEE Wireless Communications • February 2017
(a) (b)
Figure 2. An example of region graph and quadtree graph: a) the region graph;
b) the quadtree.
When RSU j receives a Hello packet from vehi-
cle i, it adds the Vi(vid, v, din, dout, rid, t) to list
L r. If the difference of current system time and
the timestamp t is above a threshold, the packet
becomes old, and we delete it from list L v. For
RSU-to-vehicle list L r2v, we exploit the idea of
a backward learning algorithm to build list Lr2v.
Every entry RVi of list Lr2v has three fields: RVi(rid,
dout, num), where rid is the identifier of the esti-
mated next arrival RSU, dout is the direction of
the vehicle leaving the RSU, and num is the statis-
tic value with initial value set to zero. When RSU j
receives a hello packet from vehicle i, it first deter-
mines whether the tuples RVi(Vi.rid, Vi.din) are in
list Lr2v. Vi.rid means the RSU id that vehicle meets
for the last time, and Vi.din means the direction of
the vehicle toward the RSU. If it is not in the list,
the RSU adds the RVi(Vi.rid, Vi.din, 1) in list Lr2v.
Otherwise, the RSU updates the num value of this
entry, that is, num = (num + 1).
As Fig. 3 shows, there are three RSUs, Ra, Rb
and Rc, and three vehicles, v1, v2, and v3, in the
system. Assume that the vehicle’s trajectories are
shown in the lines with arrows. If v1 comes from Ra
and enters RSU Rb toward the north direction, the
entry (Ra, north, 1) is added to the RSU-to-vehicle
list of Rb. Finally, Rb’s vehicle list is (V1.vid, V1.v,
V1.din, V1.dout, V1.rid, V1.t), (V2.vid, V2.v, V2.din,
V2.dout, V2.rid, V2.t), and (V3.vid, V3.v, V3.din,
V3.dout, V3.rid, V3.t), and Rb’s RSU-to-vehicle list is
(Ra, north, 1), (Ra, east, 1), and (Rc, north, 1).
Problem Formulation
Our problem can be viewed as the geocast prob-
lem, that is: Given a piece of message m and a
destination area, our goal is to find a minimal vehi-
cle set and RSUs set to forward message m to the
specific vehicle in the given destination area.
Let C v and C r denote the cost to forward a
message to a vehicle and an RSU, respectively.
For a forwarding strategy, let Gv and Gr denote
the set of vehicles and RSUs that forward the
message, respectively. Thus, the total cost can be
defined as Eq. 1:
C = Cv · |Gv| + Cr · |Gr| (1)
Our problem asks for the optimal forwarding
strategy of vehicles Gv and RSUs Gr, such that the
total defined cost in Eq. 1 is minimized.
55

Vehicle trajectory
Rb
V1 Ra Rc V3
V2
Figure 3. An example of an RSU’s list.
Our Solution
In this section, we first give an overview of our
solution, then present a case study for the pro-
posed approach in the last section.
Overview
In order to solve the geocast problem, we pro-
pose our RSU Assisted Geocast (RAG) approach.
The RAG approach has three steps:
1. A source vehicle sends the message to its near-
est RSU.
2. The nearby RSU receives the message, then the
nearest RSU transmits the message to the desti-
nation RSU.
3. The destination RSU sends the message to the
destination vehicles.
Step 1: From Source Vehicle to Its Nearest
RSU: When source vehicle v s wants to send a
message m to its nearest RSU Rn, it determines
whether Rn is within its communication range. If
so, vs sends m to Rn directly. Otherwise, it finds
whether it has a neighbor vn closer to Rs. If it finds
one, vs sends the message m to vn, drops the mes-
sage, and lets vn be vs. Otherwise, vs keeps the
message until it meets a neighbor closer to Rn.
Step 2: From a Nearest RSU to a Destination
RSU: Next, the nearest RSU should transmit the mes-
sage m to the destination RSU. The RSU-to-RSU algo-
rithm has two phases. In the first phase, we should
determine a destination region based on the given
destination area. We denote Rs and gd as the source
RSU and destination region, respectively, and denote
Parent(gc) as the parent node of the current region
node gc. Based on quadtree T, we propose a tree
trimming approach. First, as each RSU maintains a
region list Lr, it finds its own region according to the
source RSU. If its own region does not contain the
destination areas, the algorithm keeps up the search
for its parent region until the current region contains
the destination areas gd. Then the algorithm uses
depth-first search to determine whether each leaf
region gf intersects with the destination area gd, if so,
this leaf region gf is added to the tree trimming set CT.
If all the leaf regions gf are covered by the destination
areas gd, we add the parent of the leaf region and
delete all the covered leaf regions.
56
In the second phase, we should find an RSU
that has the highest probability to transmit the mes-
sage to the destination vehicle. We first find the
RSU set CR of the RSUs from the tree trimming set
CT; then we build the set of destination RSUs Cd
that have meet the destination vehicle vd. If an RSU
Ri meets vehicle vd, the information of vd will be
added to its vehicle list Lv. We add RSU Ri to the
set of destination RSUs Cd. If the set of destination
RSUs Cd is not an empty set, all RSUs elect an Rd
from Cd that has the minimal encounter time with
the destination vehicle vd. Otherwise, we should
expand the given destination area.
Step 3: From a Destination RSU to a Vehicle:
Finally, the destination RSU R d should transmit
message m to the destination vehicle. The des-
tination RSU R d gets the i d, latitude, longitude,
speed, direction out of RSU Rd, and timestamp
of vd from D’s latest hello packet. We use three
steps as [3] proposed. How we differ from them is
that RSU Rd first estimates the current destination
region r d and the next arrival of RSU R’d. Since
the destination RSU maintains the vehicle list Lv
and RSU-to-vehicle list L r2v, it can estimate the
current position of vd and give an estimated area
according to the speed of the vehicle. Accord-
ing to the vehicle’s direction out of RSU R d, Rd
finds the maximum possibility to the next arrival of
RSU R’d. Then the operations of vehicles outside
of the estimated area and inside of the estimated
area are the same as [3]. Finally, when the desti-
nation vehicle receives the message, it sends an
Acknowledgment message to the nearest RSUs.
A Case Study
In this subsection, we show a case study of the pro-
posed tree trimming approach. As shown in Fig. 4,
we use yellow to represent the source region and
blue to represent the destination area. The tree
trimming algorithm searches for the quadtree’s
root, as the root region covers the destination area
and source region. Note that we do not always
search for the root region, but search for an inter-
mediate node as long as it covers the destination
area and source region. Then we use depth-first
search and build the set of clip regions as the blue
nodes shown. In order to reduce the complexity,
we delete eight gray nodes and add their parents
to the set of the tree trimming. At the end of the
tree trimming, we determine a destination region
efficiently based on the given destination area.
Complexity Analysis
In this subsection, we give some definitions and
theoretical analysis about the tree trimming algo-
rithm. We develop an algorithm that selects a list
of squares from the quadtree to cover a circular
region.
Definition 2: A decomposition of an a  b rect-
angular region R is partitioned into four equal size
rectangles R1, R2, R3, R4 of size
a b
× .
2 2 .
It is called rectangular decomposition. Define func-
tions F(Ri) = R for i = 1, 2, 3, 4 and S(R,i) = Ri for
i = 1, 2, 3, 4.
Definition 3: Given a rectangular region R* to
be the root of a tree T, for each internal node R
in tree T, it has four children R 1, R 2, R 3, and R 4
IEEE Wireless Communications • February 2017
that form a rectangular decomposition of R. We
call tree T to be a rectangular-decomposition-tree
(RD-Tree) for R*. If R is of size a  b with a ≤ kb
and b ≤ ka, it is called a k-rectangular-decomposi-
tion-tree. A square-decomposition-tree is a 1-rect-
angular-decomposition-tree.
Definition 4: For a circle C and a rectangu-
lar-decomposition-tree T, a pruning of C in T is a
subset of nodes R1, …, Rm (rectangles) in T that
satisfies the following conditions:
1. C ⊆ R1 ∪ R2 ∪… Rm;
2. For each Ri (i = 1, 2, …, m), Ri ∩ C ≠ ;
3. If Ri ⊆ C, then F(Ri) ⊆/ C;
4. For each pair of Ri and Rj, Ri ⊆ / Rj; and
5. If Ri ⊆
/ C, then Ri is a leaf in T.
We give a recursive description about how to
prune a rectangular decomposition tree with a
circle.
Algorithm Prune(C, R, T): Input: an input of circle
of radius r, a node R in T, and a rectangular-de-
composition-tree T;
If R ∩ C = , then return ;
If R ⊆ C, then return {R};
else
If R has children R1, R2, R3, R4,
then return Prune(C, R1, T) ∪ Prune(C, R2, T) ∪
Prune(C, R3, T) ∪ Prune(C, R4, T);
else return {R} (R is a leaf);
End of Algorithm
We have the following theorem that shows the
computational time complexity for the algorithm
to prune a rectangular decomposition tree.
Theorem 1: Assume that k is fixed at least 1.
Let h  g be the size of least rectangle in a k-rect-
angular decomposition tree T. Then there is an
⎛ r r⎞
O ⎜ d + log ⎟
⎝ h h⎠
time algorithm that generates a pruning of C of
radius r in T with root R*, where d is the depth of
the tree.
Proof: For a circle C of radius r, we can prune
the tree T by a top-down approach by calling the
function Prune(C, R*, T).
Claim 1: There are at most
⎛ r⎞
O⎜ ⎟
⎝ d⎠
rectangles of size a  b in T with non-empty inter-
section with C.
Proof: Without loss of generality, assume a ≤ b.
We have b ≤ ka by Definition 3. All rectangles of
size a  b that have intersection with the bound-
ary of C are between two circles of radii
r − 1+ k 2 a and r + 1+ k 2 a,
respectively. The two circles are of the same cen-
ter as that of C. The number of rectangles of size
a  b in this region is bounded by
( ) − π(r − )
2 2
π r + 1+ k 2 a 1+ k 2 a
a×b
4π 1+ k ra 4π 1+ k 2 r
2
⎛ r⎞
≤ = = O⎜ ⎟ .
a×a a ⎝ a⎠
IEEE Wireless Communications • February 2017
(a) (b)
Figure 4. An example of intersection region and quadtree; a) the intersection
region of destination; b) the intersection node of quadtree.
Claim 2: There is a constant c0 such that if R1,
R2, …, Rm is a pruning list of C of radius r in T, then
m ≤ c0(r/h).
Proof: For each a  b rectangle R fully inside
C in the pruning list of C, without loss of gener-
ality, let a ≤ b and b ≤ ka. The distance from the
center of R to the boundary of C is at most 10b.
Otherwise, F(R) is in the pruning list. The number
of nodes in the pruning of C of radius r in T is
at most c(r/a) for some constant c0 by Claim 1.
Thus, the number of rectangles of the same size
as R in the pruning list of C is at most c1(r/a) for
some constant c1. The total number of rectangles
in the list of pruning of C in T is at most
+∞ ⎛ r ⎞ ⎛ r⎞
∑ t=0 c1 ⎜ t ⎟ = O ⎜ ⎟ .
⎝ 2 h⎠ ⎝ h⎠
The largest rectangle node in the pruning list
of C in T is of size at a  b with a = O(r) and b
= O(r). In tree T, the distance of the largest size
rectangle in the pruning list to a leaf is O(log (r/h).
This is because that the sizes of rectangles shrink
exponentially from a node to its children in the
tree T. Therefore, the total time is
⎛ r r⎞
O ⎜ d + log ⎟ .
⎝ h h⎠
Performance Evaluation
In this section, we evaluate the performance of
our proposed method and present the simulation
results of the algorithm for different situations.
Synthetic Simulation Model
In the synthetic simulation, the area of the region
area is 100 km  100 km. We assume that there
is no transmission conflict, and both vehicles and
RSUs have infinite buffer to store messages. The
vehicle speed follows the normal distribution
N(m v, s v) where m v = 50 km/s and the default s v
= 30 km/s, and a vehicle can change its speed
at each road section. The communication range
of RSUs is 2 km, the number of RSUs is 100, and
the number of vehicles is 100. We assume that
one-hop communication delay is 200 ms, and
communication delay between RSUs is 50 ms.
We consider three performance metrics: delivery
cos, delivery delay, and delivery ratio. For delivery
cost, we consider the total number of transmis-
sions, and we do not count the data delivery cost
for the control overhead for election RSUs in our
57
 250
RAG
Flood
Random
200
150
Delivery cost
Delivery cost
100
50
0 20
20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180 200
Number of RSUs
(a)
Figure 5. Impact of number of RSUs and communication range: a) delivery cost vs. number of RSUs; b) delivery cost vs. communication
range.
performance evaluation. We investigate the influ-
ence of our proposed algorithm and other algo-
rithms under different number of RSUs, different
communication range, different vehicle speed,
different number of vehicles, and different region
area. We compare several algorithms as follows.
RSU-Assisted Geocast Algorithm (RAG): Our
proposed algorithm for geocast problem. We first
send the message to the nearest RSU with mini-
mal cost, then select an optimal RSU to send the
message. Finally, the RSU sends the message to
the specific vehicle in the given area.
Flood Algorithm (Flood): In this algorithm, the
vehicle first floods the message to the nearest
RSU, then the nearest RSU floods the message
to all the RSUs in the specific region. Finally, the
RSUs flood the messages to the vehicles in the
given area.
Random Algorithm (Random): In this algo-
rithm, the vehicle first sends the message to a ran-
dom RSU, then the RSU sends the message to
a random RSU in the specific region. Finally, the
random RSU floods the messages to the vehicles
in the given area.
Impact of Number of RSUs
We investigate how the changes of number of
RSUs affect the performance of the different algo-
rithms. Figure 5a shows the delivery cost of three
algorithms under different number of RSUs from
20 to 200 with an increment of 20. Compared
to other algorithms, our RAG algorithm always
obtains the minimal cost, as shown in Fig. 5a.
Impact of Communication Range
We investigate how seriously communication
ranges of RSUs affect the performance of the dif-
ferent algorithms. We also use Fig. 5b to show
the delivery cost under different communication
range of RSUs. The communication range is from
0.8 to 2.6 km with an increment of 0.2 km. As
shown in Fig. 5b, even when the communication
range is small, the RAG algorithm still achieves
good performance (e.g., when communication
range is 0.8 km). As the communication range
increases, the delivery cost of all algorithms
58
120
110
100
RAG
90 Flood
Random
80
70
60
50
40
30
0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2 2.2 2.4
Communication range of RSU (km)
(b)
decreases slightly. It is because the system is not
sensitive to the delivery cost as the communica-
tion range increases.
Impact of Region Area
We investigate how the changes of region area
affect the delivery delay. We select Fig. 6a to
show the delivery delay under different road area
from 20 km  20 km to 200 km  200 km. Com-
pared to other algorithms, our RAG algorithm
always obtains the lower delay in Fig. 6a. Mean-
while, the larger region area leads to the higher
delay. This is because the larger region area yields
less opportunity for a vehicle to meet RSUs, lead-
ing to higher delivery delay.
Impact of Number of Vehicles
We investigate how the changes of number of
vehicles affect the delivery ratio in Fig. 6b. The
number of vehicles is from 50 to 500. As shown
in Fig. 6b, the ratio of our proposed algorithm
performs better than the Flood algorithm and
worse than the Random algorithm. As the number
of vehicles increases, the delivery ratio increases
quickly. This is because the larger number of vehi-
cles yields more opportunity for multihop wire-
less communication, not for carry-and-forward
communication. This can be understood since
with the larger number of vehicles, RAG has a
higher opportunity to find the specific vehicle in
the given area.
Conclusion
In this article, we investigate the geocast problem
in vehicular ad hoc networks, which finds minimal
cost to relay a message to a specific vehicle in
a given geographical area. We exploit roadside
units to help geocast. First, we propose a quadtree
model that represents a hierarchical decompo-
sition of the global region. Then we propose a
tree trimming approach to get the intersection
between the destination area and the quadtree.
Next, we propose an election approach that
selects an optimal RSU to forward the message
to the destination area based on the quadtree
model. Simulation results show the effectiveness
IEEE Wireless Communications • February 2017
 1000
RAG
900 Flood
Random
800
700
Delivery delay (s)
600
500
400
300
200
100
0 10
20 40 60 80 100 120
Region width (km)
(a)
Figure 6. Impact of communication range and number of vehicles: a) delivery delay vs. region area; b) delivery ratio vs. number of vehicles.
of our methods under different environments. As
future work, we will explore how to effectively
geocast under different forwarding models.
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the National Science
Foundation of China (Nos. 61502359, 61572370,
61373040, and 61303117). This research was
also supported in part by National Science Foun-
dation Early Career Award 0845376 and the Ben-
sten Fellowship of the University of Texas -Rio
Grande Valley.
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IEEE Wireless Communications • February 2017
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Flood
80 Random
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Biographies
Peng Li (lipeng@wust.edu.cn) received his B.S. degree in com-
puter science and technology from Wuhan University of Tech-
nology, China, in 2003, his M.S. degree in computer science
from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan,
China, in 2006, and his Ph.D. degree in computer science from
Wuhan University in 2015. He is currently a visiting scholar with
the University of Calgary, Canada. He is also an associate pro-
fessor with Wuhan University of Science and Technology. His
research interests include vehicular networks, mobile comput-
ing, and cloud computing.
Tao Zhang [M’05, SM’07] (tzhang@nyit.edu) received her M.S.
and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of
Texas at Dallas in 2003 and 2005, respectively. She joined the
faculty of New York Institute of Technology at Old Westbury in
2005. She is currently a professor of computer science at New
York Institute of Technology. Her research interest spans wireless
communication and networking, cloud computing, WDM optical
networks, and network security focusing on the design and anal-
ysis of network architectures and protocols. She was the Principal
Investigator of two National Science Foundation (NSF) funded
projects. She currently serves on the NSF Proposal Review Panel.
C huanhe H uang (huangch@whu.edu.cn) received his B.S.,
M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Wuhan
University in 1985, 1988, and 2002, respectively. He is currently
a professor and Ph.D. supervisor at the School of Computers,
Wuhan University. His research interests include SDN, oppor-
tunistic networks, and wireless networks, focusing on cryptogra-
phy, wireless security, and trust management.
X i C hen (chenxi_cs@whu.edu.cn) is working for his Ph.D. in
computer system architecture at Wuhan University. He received
his B.Sc. degree in computer science and technology from
Wuhan University in 2011. His research interests are in the area
of wireless networks, with an emphasis on the design and opti-
mization of medium access control protocols for long-distance
wireless network.
Bin Fu (bin.fu@utrgv.edu) received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in
computer science from Wuhan University in 1985 and 1988,
respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in computer science in 1998
from Yale University, where he finished his Ph.D. dissertation,
Volume Bounded Molecular Computing, under the supervision
of Dr. Richard Beigel. He is currently a professor at the Univer-
sity of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His research interests include
the fields of algorithms, bioinformatics, complexity theory, and
molecular computing. He received the U.S. National Science
Foundation Early Career Award (2009–2014).
59