Information Sharing in VANETs

This chapter looks at a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) as a peer-to-peer network, where mobile users may request information contents as well as provide them to other nodes, and it addresses the major technical issues that emerge when dealing with information sharing in VANETs. After briefly reviewing some proposals appeared in the literature on application and network protocols for data exchange in VANETs, the chapter focuses on a possible application for data sharing between vehicular users, which exploits the pull-based approach. It then highlights the main challenges in such a scenario and introduces some mechanisms that can be applied to solve two major issues in content sharing: content query propagation and content caching. A comparison among the schemes presented for query propagation, as well as between the mechanisms introduced for data caching, is shown through simulation results derived using the network simulator ns2. Finally, future challenges and emerging research topics for content sharing and dissemination in VANETs are outlined.