With the advancement of connected vehicles, high-bandwidth wireless technologies such as DSRC and WiFi are envisioned to be pervasively available on vehicles. Such empowered vehicles can form large-scale vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), which contain rich bandwidth and storage resources. Despite their critical importance for core safety-related VANET applications, these resources are underutilized in practice due to infrequent occurrence and limited size of safety-related messages. However, for a broad range of delay-tolerant applications, which run on edge networks and demand transmission of bulky data with hours or days of delay allowance, such underutilized bandwidth and storage resources in VANETs can be highly valuable. To efficiently utilize VANET resources for delay-tolerant bulky data transmission without compromising the performance of safety-related VANET applications, we propose a Delay-tolerant Data Transportation (DDT) scheme, which aims to use minimal VANET bandwidth to accomplish long-term data transportation under certain end-to-end delay requirements. Unlike traditional VANET data dissemination schemes which prefer data forwarding, DDT primarily relies on a more bandwidth-conserving data carrying method for data transportation. This unique feature makes our proposed system suitable to serve as a supplementary communication infrastructure for offloading and thus alleviating the data transmission workload on edge networks. Extensive simulations have been conducted using a customized simulator, and the results have demonstrated DDT’s reliability and adaptability under various scenarios. Particularly, with moderate traffic density and delay requirements, the VANET bandwidth consumption of DDT is 27.3% lower than that of a naive scheme and 5.3% higher than that of a lower bound obtained from theoretical analysis, while the satisfaction ratio of delay requirements is as high as 0.965.

随着联网车辆的发展，高带宽无线技术（如DSRC和WiFi）已被广泛应用于车辆上。这种授权的车辆可以形成大规模的车辆自组织网络（VANET），其中包含丰富的带宽和存储资源。尽管它们对于与安全性相关的核心VANET应用至关重要，但是由于与安全性相关的消息很少出现且大小有限，因此这些资源在实践中并未得到充分利用。但是，对于在边缘网络上运行并要求传输大量数据且具有数小时或数天的延迟允许的大量延迟耐受应用程序，VANET中这种未充分利用的带宽和存储资源可能具有很高的价值。为了有效利用VANET资源进行耐延迟的大容量数据传输而又不影响与安全相关的VANET应用程序的性能，我们提出了一种耐延迟的数据传输（DDT）方案，该方案旨在使用最小的VANET带宽来完成长期数据传输在某些端到端延迟要求下。与喜欢数据转发的传统VANET数据分发方案不同，DDT主要依赖于节省带宽的数据传输方法进行数据传输。这种独特的功能使我们提出的系统适合用作辅助通信基础结构，以减轻负载，从而减轻边缘网络上的数据传输工作量。使用定制的模拟器进行了广泛的模拟，结果证明了滴滴涕在各种情况下的可靠性和适应性。特别是，在中等流量密度和延迟要求的情况下，DDT的VANET带宽消耗比朴素方案低27.3％，比从理论分析获得的下限低5.3％，而延迟要求的满意度为高达0.965。