An Epidemic Routing Strategy For Vehicular Ad Hoc Wireless Networks In Intelligent Transportation Systems

The inter-vehicle communication is a key technique of intelligent transport systems (ITS). Moving vehicles on highways can easily construct ad-hoc networks if they are equipped with WLAN-based communication equipments. However, since the traffic density is time varying, it is likely that such networks are disconnected. This paper proposes and tests the hypothesis that the motion of vehicles on a highway can contribute to successful message delivery provided that messages can be stored temporarily at moving nodes while waiting for opportunities to be forwarded further. Using vehicle movement traces from a traffic microsimulator, we measure average message delivery time and find that it is shorter than that when the messages are not relayed. We conclude that ad hoc relay wireless networks, based on wireless LAN technologies, have potential for many emerging intelligent transportation applications.