Search

Message dissemination issue in Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has been extensively studied both by computer simulations and experimental testbeds. Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) technology has been standardized and used extensively as the main mechanism to support the message dissemination in VANETs. Nevertheless, other alternatives such as 3G/4G and WLAN have also been proposed to further assist with the message dissemination in VANETs. Due to the ubiquity of the smartphones, in this paper, we propose to leverage the use of smartphone to disseminate message in VANETs. An android-based system that uses WLAN ad-hoc technology is proposed. The feasibility and performance of the proposed system are investigated by simulations and the evaluation results show that given the high penetration of smartphones, the message dissemination can be done via the smartphones. Although the delay performance of the proposed system is inferior to DSRC-based system, the proposed system could still be very useful especially during the deployment stage of the DSRC technology (when the penetration rate of the technology is low).

In this paper, we propose and implement a proximity-based information propagation framework based on Android devices. With the ubiquity of the smartphones and a drastic increase in demands of cellular traffic, the information propagation mechanism proposed and implemented in this paper entirely relies on the mobile-to-mobile (i.e., ad-hoc) communications. In contrast to the WiFi Direct technology (i.e., single-hop ad hoc communications), the pure ad-hoc communications enabled in our proposed framework allows multi-hop message propagation. In addition, a mitigation technique is also implemented to prevent the broadcast storm problems caused by redundant rebroadcasts. The implementation of the pure ad-hoc and multi-hop communications have been tested in several Android phone models and in a few tests scenarios which were conducted to determine the feasibility as well as the limitation of using mobile devices for the proximity-based information propagation.