Information dissemination in a multi-technology communication network

1. A method for executing or adapting a forwarding strategy in a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET), the method comprising:

performing, by a first vehicle being a node in the VANET, the following actions:

analyzing current environmental conditions;

creating a forwarding strategy for forwarding information to other vehicles being nodes in the VANET based on the current environmental conditions, wherein one or more of the other vehicles are selected to be either a relay node or a forwarding node in the forwarding strategy based on dissimilarity relations with respect to coverage areas; and

forwarding the information to the other vehicles in the VANET according to the created forwarding strategy.

2. The method according to claim 1 , further comprising determining, by the first vehicle, that the created forwarding strategy is different than a previously received forwarding strategy, and exchanging the previously received forwarding strategy for the created forwarding strategy.

3. The method according to claim 1 , further comprising reporting, by the first vehicle, information to a central entity of the VANET, wherein the central entity determines coverage areas of nodes of the VANET.

4. The method according to claim 3 , wherein the information reported to the central entity includes one or more of a speed of the first vehicle, a position of the first vehicle, connectivity information of the first vehicle, link quality to one or more neighbor vehicles or road-side network nodes, cellular latency, and packet loss.

5. The method according to claim 3 , wherein the information reported to the central entity is transmitted at regular intervals.

6. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the forwarding information to other vehicles in the VANET according to the created forwarding strategy comprises forwarding information to other vehicles via short-range communications.

7. The method according to claim 6 , wherein the short-range communications are transmitted via a wireless local area network (WLAN) channel.

8. The method according to claim 6 , wherein the short-range communications are transmitted via ITS-G5 vehicle-to-vehicle technology or via LTE device-to-device technology.

9. The method according to claim 1 , further comprising forwarding information to VANET infrastructure via long-range communications.

10. The method according to claim 1 , the method further comprising determining that the first vehicle has been selected as a forwarder node.

11. The method according to claim 10 , wherein the determining that the first vehicle has been selected as a forwarder node comprises determining that a previously received forwarding strategy has selected the first vehicle as a forwarder node.

12. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the current environmental conditions include one or more of a speed of the first vehicle, a position of the first vehicle, connectivity information of the first vehicle, link quality to one or more neighbor vehicles or road-side network nodes, cellular latency, and packet loss.

13. The method according to claim 1 , further comprising determining, for at least two neighboring ones of the other vehicles, a number of the other vehicles which are reachable by short-range communications with a predefined number of hops, and selecting one of the at least two neighboring vehicles which is determined to be able to reach more of the other vehicles as a first forwarding node in the forwarding strategy.

14. The method according to claim 13 , further comprising computing, for the one of the at least two neighboring vehicles selected as the first forwarding node, a dissimilarity index with respect to other neighboring vehicles of the other vehicles, and selecting one of the other neighboring vehicles to be a second forwarding node based thereon, wherein the one of the other neighboring vehicles having the highest dissimilarity index is selected to be the second forwarding node.

15. The method according to claim 14 , wherein the dissimilarity index is computed in each case based on a number of non-overlapping geographic coverage zones.

16. The method according to claim 1 , further comprising computing a dissimilarity index with respect to at least two other neighboring ones of the other vehicles, wherein one of the at least two other neighboring ones of the other vehicles having the highest dissimilarity index is selected to be a forwarding node.

17. The method according to claim 1 , wherein the forwarding strategy includes at least one of the other vehicles selected to be a relay node and at least one of the other vehicle selected to be a forwarding node, and wherein, according to the forwarding strategy, the relay node propagates the information through the use of cellular communication and/or short-range communication and the forwarding node propagates the information locally through the use of vehicle-to-vehicle short-range communication.

18. A vehicle in a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET), the vehicle being configured to:

analyze current environmental conditions;

create a forwarding strategy for forwarding information to other vehicles being nodes in the VANET based on the current environmental conditions, wherein one or more of the other vehicles are selected to be either a relay node or a forwarding node in the forwarding strategy based on dissimilarity relations with respect to coverage areas; and

forward the information to the other vehicles in the VANET according to the created forwarding strategy.

19. The vehicle according to claim 18 , wherein the current environmental conditions include one or more of a speed of the first vehicle, a position of the first vehicle, connectivity information of the first vehicle, link quality to one or more neighbor vehicles or road-side network nodes, cellular latency, and packet loss.

20. The vehicle according to claim 18 , wherein the vehicle is further configured to determine that the created forwarding strategy is different than a previously received forwarding strategy, and to exchange the previously received forwarding strategy for the created forwarding strategy.