Improving VANET Protocols via Network Science

TL;DR

This paper applies network science to analyze VANETs, revealing structural properties that can be leveraged to enhance routing protocols, notably reducing overhead in urban vehicular broadcasting without sacrificing performance.

Contribution

It introduces a network science approach to VANETs, providing insights into their structure and demonstrating how this knowledge can improve existing routing protocols.

Findings

VANETs exhibit small-world and scale-free network properties.

Using network parameters reduces protocol overhead significantly.

Structural analysis guides protocol improvements without performance loss.

Abstract

Developing routing protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) is a significant challenge in these large, self- organized and distributed networks. We address this challenge by studying VANETs from a network science perspective to develop solutions that act locally but influence the network performance globally. More specifically, we look at snapshots from highway and urban VANETs of different sizes and vehicle densities, and study parameters such as the node degree distribution, the clustering coefficient and the average shortest path length, in order to better understand the networks' structure and compare it to structures commonly found in large real world networks such as small-world and scale-free networks. We then show how to use this information to improve existing VANET protocols. As an illustrative example, it is shown that, by adding new mechanisms that make use of this information, the overhead of the urban vehicular broadcasting (UV-CAST) protocol can be reduced substantially with no significant performance degradation.