An Ad-Hoc Opportunistic Dissemination Protocol for Smartphone-Based Participatory Traffic Monitoring

This study introduces an ad-hoc opportunistic data dissemination protocol, called VADISS, that facilitates participatory traffic monitoring applications with smartphones. As a ubiquitous alternative to existing vehicular networking methods, VADISS uses the default WiFi interfaces universally adopted by today's mobile devices. The routing is enabled with intermittent service advertisements and discoveries, and the data exchange is provided via built-in IEEE 802.11 beacon frames. VADISS orients neither association nor connection between devices, is not based on any road-side unit, and thus is readily available for vehicular end-use applications. Together with a smartphone-based online road monitoring application, VADISS has been tested in a real- traffic setup to assess the data dissemination performance. With the increasing coverage, quite promising efficiency has been reached, especially for routing of critical traffic information.