Data Fusion for a Forecasting Link State Indicator in VANETs

Due to their lack of assessment mechanisms of link quality in VANET environments, routing protocols do not deal efficiently with highly volatile links. One way to fill this gap would be to anticipate links breakages with new route computation. Currently available link quality indicators are not sufficiently responsive to consider forecasting. In this paper we present a novel predictive link quality indicator that is based on the OFDM decoding steps into the PHY layer. The events generated by these steps are threated by a data fusion algorithms. The resulting link quality indicator presents interesting forecasting characteristics and is suitable for a cross-layer usage in routing protocols.