The Scalability Problem of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks and How to Solve it

Inter-vehicle communication (IVC) and its diverse possibilities of application have led to great interest both in research and industry. Especially the dissemination of active safety messages generated by cooperative and context sensitive applications in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) may significantly improve passenger safety and comfort. One of the main challenges inherent to the deployment of
VANETs is operability, both in lowly interconnected and in highly overloaded networks. This scalability problem is not comprehensively addressed by existing approaches as they only focus on parts of the problem. This article shows how a relevance based, altruistic communication scheme helps realizing scalability by optimizing the application benefit and the bandwidth usage. In-vehicle and inter-vehicle message selection are based on a relevance function that makes use of the current context and the content of the messages. A novel, proprietary cross-layer architecture and an IEEE 802.11e-based architecture can be used to implement the scheme. Extensive simulations have been conducted to show the functionality of the approach both for sparse and dense
networks.

http://www.comsoc.org/livepubs/pci/public/2006/oct/index.html
http://www.christoph-schroth.de