Road Aware Information Sharing in VANETs

Recently, several approaches to share road conditions and/or digital contents through VANETs have been proposed, and such approaches have generally considered the radial distance from the information source as well as the TTL to provision an ephemeral, geographically-limited information sharing service. However, they implement general MANETs and have not been tailored to the constrained movement of vehicles on roads that are mostly linear. In this paper, we propose a novel application-level mechanism that can be used to share road conditions, including accidents, detours and congestion, through a VANET. We assign probabilities to roads around each of the intersections in the neighborhood road network. We then use the graph representation of the road network to build a spanning tree of roads with the information source as the root node. Nodes below the root represent junctions, and the edges represent inter-connecting road segments. Messages propagate along the branches of the tree, and as the information propagates down the branches, the probability of replication decreases. The information is replicated until a threshold probability has been reached, and our method also ensures that messages are not delivered to irrelevant vehicles, independently of their proximity to the source. We evaluated the success rate and performance of this approach using NS-3 simulations, and we used IDM car following and MOBIL lane change models to provide realistic modeling of the vehicle mobility.