Event sharing in vehicular networks using geographic vectors and maps

By exchanging events in a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), d rivers can receive information that allows them to find relevant places (e.g., parking spaces) or avoid dangero us/undesirable situations (e.g., an accident or a traffic ja m). However, developing this kind of information services for drivers ca lls for new data management approaches, such as an appropria te dissemination protocol and some mechanism to decide when a d river should be alerted. In this paper, we present a data management solution for even t xchange in vehicular networks and compare two different approaches for relevance assessment. The first approach rel ies on the computation of geographic vectors to estimate the relevance of events, whereas the second approach exploits d igital road maps. We also describe a prototype that has allow ed us to test our proposals in a real environment. Moreover, we pre sent an exhaustive simulation-based experimental evaluat ion that proves the usefulness of exploiting the information stored in igital road maps for data management and sharing in vehic ular networks, which is an important novelty regarding existing works. The experiments also show that the first approach can a lso be used with a good accuracy, although smaller in some situat ions, in cars where maps are not available.