Design and Implementation of a Lightweight Data Dissemination Protocol for V2V Communications

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 b/g/n enabled devices are popular and widely used to provide wireless network access. Therefore, it is often considered for configuring networks for vehicles. However, because of its short signal coverage and long link setup latency, this standard cannot be used directly to support vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. In this paper, a lightweight data dissemination protocol is proposed to tackle the aforementioned issues. By utilizing a management frame format of IEEE 802.11 for data transmission, the devices can directly communicate with each other without a prior link setup process. Moreover, it supports multi-hop transmission to deliver data to out of its transmission range through relay nodes. The proposed protocol has been implemented in commercial devices and evaluated in a real vehicular network environment. The experimental results show that it is able to support seamless data dissemination through multi-hop communications in vehicular environments.