CDCP: Collaborative Data Collection Protocol in Vehicular Sensor Networks

Abstract

Vehicular sensor networks (VSNs) have emerged as a new technology, which combines wireless communication offered by vehicular ad hoc NETworks with sensing devices installed in vehicles or in roadsides. VSN creates a huge opportunity to extend the roadside sensor infrastructure of existing traffic control systems. The main issues in VSNs are inherent in the data collection and its dissemination in such a large-scale network, characterized by frequent topology changes and network partitioning. This paper proposes a new multi-hop data collection and dissemination protocol based on data replication approach. The aim is an efficient collection and dissemination of data from a defined geographic area. Differently from other data collection protocols for VSNs, which have for purpose to collect data for traffic control applications or monitoring applications, our proposed protocol called Collaborative Data Collection Protocol (CDCP for VSNs) focuses on collecting data to be used in non-delay tolerant applications, so CDCP aims to collect the requested data within an optimized delay, but also, focuses in making this data accessible for other potential requests. Simulation results show the effectiveness of our proposed protocol.