Collaborative vehicular content dissemination with directional antennas

We study the performance of collaborative vehicular content dissemination, where the content is distributed within the network by vehicle-to-vehicle opportunistic communications and the vehicle nodes are equipped with directional antennas. Through analysing a large real-world vehicle trace, we adopt an accurate mobility model of Lévy-walk to set up the realistic vehicular network simulation environment. Using a fluid approximation, we derive a theoretical model to depict the system performance of content dissemination time. The accuracy of the proposed analysis is confirmed by simulation results, which also show that the directional antenna performs better than the omni-directional antenna in our considered scenario, especially when the antenna beam is well scheduled with small beamwidth and high beam steering rate. © 2012 IEEE.