Enabling Energy Demand Response with Vehicular Mesh Networks

Inter-vehicle communication is becoming increasingly important in recent years. Traditional research efforts on vehicular networks have been put into safety or infotainment applications. In this article, we propose a Vehicular Mesh network (VMesh) to inter-connect disjoint sensor networks and act as a data transit network. Our VMesh networks are designed to provide a low cost, high fidelity, scalable, and fault resilient solution for data collections and disseminations. Preliminary simulation results based on a random mobility model show that the system has better performance when mobile routers are allowed to talk to peers. Mobile router density and transmission ranges dominate the simulation results. When the router density is high and/or transmission range is large, the data success rate will be high and latency will be small. There also exists a critical value of transmission ranges. There are no significant performance improvements once this critical value is reached.