Distributed And Real Time Communications Road Connectivity Discovery through Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

Recent studies have demonstrated that the performance of routing protocols in vehicular networks can be improved by using dynamic road traffic information to select the most appropriate forwarding paths or nodes. However, most of the techniques to estimate such traffic conditions imply an important communications overhead that compromises their future viability. In this context, this paper introduces and evaluates DiRCoD, a novel technique to estimate the multi-hop connectivity of road segments, and hence their capability to reliably forward data packets through multi-hop communications. As the paper will demonstrate, this technique is capable to provide such connectivity information with a high periodicity, and low overhead and implementation cost.