A Feasibility Study on Disseminating Spatio - temporal Information via Vehicular Ad - hoc Networks

In this paper we study the feasibility of disseminating reports about resources via vehicular ad-hoc networks. Each disseminated report represents information about a spatial-temporal event, such as the availability of a parking slot at a particular time. The simple flooding algorithm is used for dissemination in a VANET. The feasibility is analyzed by comparing the effectiveness of VANET with that of client-server. The performance measure integrates throughput and response time, the two traditional measures for evaluation of data dissemination algorithms. The comparison is based on realistic simulation of vehicle mobility in a real road network and of the 802.11 protocol. The comparison enables determining the superior architecture (VANET or client-server) for a given environment.