A cooperative scheme to aggregate spatio-temporal events in VANETs

Abstract

Today, thanks to vehicular networks, drivers may receive useful information produced or relayed by neighboring sensors or vehicles (e.g., the location of an available parking space, of a traffic congestion, etc.). In this paper, we address the problem of providing assistance to the driver when no recent information has been received on his/her vehicle. Therefore, we present a cooperative scheme to aggregate, store and exchange these events in order to have an history of past events. This scheme is based on a dedicated spatio-temporal aggregation structure using Flajolet-Martin sketches and deployed on each vehicle. Contrary to existing approaches considering data aggregation in vehicular networks, our main goal here is not to save network bandwidth but rather to extract useful knowledge from previous observations. In this paper, we present our aggregation data structure, the associated exchange protocol and a set of experiments showing the effectiveness of our proposal.