Where people and cars meet: social interactions to improve information sharing in large scale vehicular networks

Efficient delivery of information in vehicular networks is crucial for the creation of useful and usable applications that need to cope with nomadic large-scale environments. Context-awareness is often key to improve efficiency of a vehicle network since it allows to make informed decisions on the data routing, data locality and data necessity for different moving objects. In this paper we show how the social network of vehicle residents, as part of the overall context, allows us to improve the information sharing in the vehicular network significantly. We demonstrate this by deploying a social ubiquitous-help-system (UHS) on top of a vehicular network. We analyze how UHS operates in a vehicular network using a network simulation of realistic large scale vehicular movement data and show that the social interactions increases the efficiency, relevance and quality of information in data delivery.