Cooperative monitoring and dissemination of urban events supported by dynamic clustering of vehicles

Abstract

Critical urban events take places at a random way and they need to be dealt with by public authorities quickly to maintain the proper operation of cities. The main challenges for an efficient handling fall in the random nature of the event, and in the speed and accuracy of its notification to the authority. The pervasiveness of vehicles in the cities, and their communication and monitoring capabilities, allow VANETs to support the dissemination and handling of such events. Thus, this work proposes MINUET, a dynamic system to support the monitoring and dissemination of urban events, which operates in a VANET. It uses a cooperative-based strategy where vehicles dynamically coordinate the monitoring and dissemination of events in real time by the means of clusters. A performance comparative analysis in NS3 with a target tracking approach shows the efficiency of MINUET regarding the real-time monitoring, the dissemination of urban event data and data availability at the destination in dense and sparse networks.