Data-on-the-Road in Intelligent Transportation Systems

In this paper we examine the dissemination of information about resources in mobile ad-hoc networks, where moving objects communicate with each other via short-range wireless transmission. Each disseminated resource represents an observed spatial-temporal event, and the relevance of the resource to a moving object decays as the age of the resource and the distance from its location increase. We propose an opportunistic approach, in which an object propagates the resources it carries (namely the information that it has about these resources) to encountered objects and obtains new resources in exchange. Least relevant resources are discarded during exchanges so as to accommodate more relevant ones in the object’s limited memory space. We propose two variants of the opportunistic dissemination algorithm, and a query processing scheme for finding all the resources in a geographic area.