A multi-hop broadcast wave approach for floating car data collection in vehicular networks

Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC) is bringing connected and cooperative mobility closer to reality. Vehicles today are able to produce huge amounts of information, known in the literature as Floating Car Data (FCD), containing status information gathered from sensing the internal condition of the vehicle and the external environment. Adding networking capabilities to vehicles allows them to share this information among themselves and with the infrastructure. Collecting real-time FCD information from vehicles opens up the possibility of having access to an enormous amount of useful information that can boost the development of innovative services and applications in the domain of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). In this paper we propose several solutions to efficiently collect real-time FCD information in Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC)-enabled Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). The goal is to improve the efficiency of the FCD collection operation while keeping the impact on the DSRC communication channel as low as possible. We do this by exploiting a slightly modified version of a standardized data dissemination protocol to create a backbone of relaying vehicles that, by following local rules, generate a multi-hop broadcast wave of collected FCD messages. The proposed protocols are evaluated via realistic simulations under different vehicular densities and urban scenarios.