Data Offloading Techniques Through Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: A Survey

Recently, for satisfying users' various mobile Internet service requests for data exchange anytime and anywhere even in their moving vehicles, the generated mobile data traffic has been rapidly increasing and has become a serious burden on current cellular networks. To partially address such a serve challenge, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have emerged as an effective approach for enhancing vehicular services and applications by equipping vehicles with wireless and processing capabilities. In this paper, we survey the recent advances in the data offloading techniques through VANETs. Particularly, based on the communication patterns among vehicles and infrastructures, we classify these techniques into three categories, i.e., data offloading through vehicle-to-vehicle communications, vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, and vehicle-to-everything communications. Besides, we present a detailed taxonomy of the related techniques by discussing the pros and cons for various offloading techniques for different problems in VANETs. Finally, some opening research issues and challenges are outlined to provide guidelines for future research work.