A vision of cooperation tools for VANETs

A Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork (VANET) is a special type of Movile Ad-hoc Network designed to provide communications among On-Board Units (OBUs) in nearby vehicles, and between OBUs in vehicles and Road-Side Units (RSUs) that are fixed equipment located on the road. Data packets have to be relayed hop by hop from a given OBU to a RSU or another OBU and vice-versa. This means that the mobile stations must accept to forward information for the benefit of other stations. However, these benefits would vanish if the mobile stations did not properly cooperate and forward packets for other stations. In this paper, we address this problem and propose mechanisms that encourage collaboration in packet forwarding.