Modeling Efficient and Effective Communications in VANET through Population Protocols

Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) enable a countless set of next-generation applications thanks to the technological progress of the last decades. These applications rely on the assumption that a simple network of vehicles can be extended with more complex and powerful network infrastructure, in which several Road Side Units (RSUs) are employed to achieve application-specific goals. However, this assumption is not always satisfied as in many real-world scenarios it is unfeasible to have a conspicuous deployment of RSUs, due to both economic and environmental constraints. With the aim to overcome this limitation, in this paper we investigate how the only Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications can be effectively exploited to share data among the vehicles about an event of interest, such as vehicular traffic. In this sense, we propose a novel communication schema based on the Population Protocol model that allows vehicles to be efficiently updated about a given event. Experimental analysis aims to evaluate the performance of the proposed schema, while also highlighting the benefits it might bring in VANETs applications.