Efficient Peer-to-Peer Unicasting for VANET Architectures via Enhanced Monolithic Protocols

With the advent of vehicular networks and the corresponding requirements, developers are faced with new challenges associated with fundamental protocol attributes and capabilities. In our work, we consider ESP-NOW: a connectionless WiFi communication protocol developed by Espressif and featuring short packet (up to 250 bytes) transmission. It is different from more traditional WiFi protocols, as the upper five layers of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) stack are simplified to a single monolithic layer. The data does not need to travel through all the OSI-or Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)-specific layers, which measurably reduces over-head, processing delay all while increasing system responsiveness. The presented work targets the considerable research gap in regards to this protocol and constitutes an attempt to dissect it and provide experimental results, which prove to be promising for highly mobile clusters. Relevant developments find great applicability in ad hoc and vehicular communications, where real-time connectivity and sufficient coverage are pivotal in supporting reliable networking. In this paper, we also investigate the usage of a modified 802.11 standard to enable long-range and low-power interfacing amongst networked vehicular nodes.