AutoCast: A General-Purpose Data Dissemination Protocol and its Application in Vehicular Networks
Horst Hellbrück, Axel Wegener and Stefan Fischer
For today’s mobile applications in ubiquitous/pervasive environments, the classical client-server approach with tightly-coupled components does not suit anymore. Instead, new ways of information passing between such mobile components have to be searched: components will often have no dedicated communication partner, but rather send data into a certain direction in order to inform all participants in a specific area about an event or a status. This process is called data dissemination. In this paper we introduce a new data dissemination protocol named AutoCast. Unlike other approaches, AutoCast is flexible enough to support a broad variety of different types of mobile applications. The paper presents the major design decisions taken forAutoCast and the protocol features in detail. A thorough evaluation shows the effectiveness and efficiency of the new protocol.