Understanding the capabilities of a vehicle Ad-hoc Network for highway systems

Real time situational awareness has the potential to improve the response and management of intelligent transportation system (ITS) components in critical situations. In the event of sudden or potentially dangerous situations, such as hazardous material spills or reckless driving, every second counts to reduce the overall impact of the event. Currently, assessing surface deterioration and identifying unsafe conditions can be costly and timely to a monitoring agency, and often requires traffic control and other delays to the users of a highway system. Utilizing vehicles as probes to sense and collect these data would give traffic and agency planners a continuously updated view of the network. This article introduces a model to analyze the feasibility of achieving near-real-time situational awareness for highway systems by Vehicle Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). Each vehicle acts as a data collection probe, gathering information such as surface friction and distress, and is enabled with short-range wireless technology, allowing condition awareness broadcasts to be propagated to other vehicles. The analysis suggests it would be possible to provide awareness up to several kilometers away from the location of the issue in a near-real-time manner, provided adequate traffic density. This approach is envisioned to be particularly suitable for critical traffic monitoring, such as in emergency management and homeland security applications related to transportation systems.