Propagation characteristics of dynamic information on collected by in-vehicle sensors in a vehicular network

In this paper we see vehicles as mobile sensors and disseminators of information about their surroundings. This emerging concept goes beyond the past efforts of dealing only with traffic congestion that has become a part of daily life for most of us. Many researchers worked on various congestion information systems that are mainly based on the concept of collecting and disseminating traffic information through the use of vehicles roaming throughout the transportation network. Today a number of commercial solutions exist for disseminating traffic information (e.g., Traffic.com, Metrocommute, Etak- Traffic). However, these solutions are plagued by prohibitive deployment and maintenance cost that prevents widespread deployment. As an alternative, solutions based on peer-to-peer architecture have also been proposed. But most these systems are limited with collecting and disseminating the concept of travel time or congestion information. In this paper, we propose a three layered implementation architecture that will use vehicles to collect, process and disseminate information other than travel time including visibility, pavement, and weather conditions. We first describe vehicle-based experiments that we conducted to assess the feasibility of the proposed system. Then, we use a well-calibrated microscopic traffic simulation model of a relatively large network in New Jersey to test the speed and the range of information dissemination.