Dear mobile agent, could you please find me a parking space?

Abstract

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted a great interest in the last years due to their potential utility for drivers in applications that provide information about relevant events (accidents, emergency brakings, etc.), traffic conditions or even available parking spaces. To accomplish this, the vehicles exchange data among them using wireless communications that can be obtained from different sources, such as sensors or alerts sent by other drivers. In this paper, we propose searching of parking spaces by using a mobile agent that jumps from one vehicle to another to reach the parking area and obtain the required data directly. We perform an experimental evaluation with promising results that show the feasibility of our proposal.