Group formation through cooperating node in VANETs

Abstract

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) will play a vital role in the future road safety and comfort. The lack of centralized infrastructure and high node mobility and number of vehicles generate problems such as interrupting connections, difficult routing, security of communications and scalability. Groups are here proposed as a solution to avoid data collisions by decreasing the number of connections exchanged among vehicles. To reach this goal, nodes should cooperate with each other. They should form groups or join a group depending on their state. This paper provides a global vision of the life cycle of cooperative nodes who form groups and a description of how to deal with the information within a group. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme reduces the number of communications, avoiding data loss due to collisions. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.