Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks in Intelligent Transportation Systems

The convergence of telecommunication, computing, wireless, and transportation technologies facilitates that our roads and highways can be both our communications and transportation platforms. These changes will completely revolutionize when and how we access services, communicate, commute, entertain, and navigate, in the coming future. The specific characteristics of vehicular networks favor the development of attractive and challenging services and applications. In this book we focus on safety applications. Specifically, we develop and evaluate a novel protocol to improve safety on the road. Our proposal combines location information of vehicles, and roadmap scenario characteristics, to improve warning message dissemination. In safety- based applications for vehicular networks our approach is able to reduce the broadcast storm problem while maintaining a high message dissemination effectiveness towards surrounding vehicles. Finally, we assess the performance of our proposed protocol using our enhanced simulation platform, evidencing the importance of an adequate simulation framework to achieve more realistic results and draw more meaningful conclusions.