Traffic information system: A lightweight geocast-based piggybacking strategy for cooperative awareness in VANET

As a cornerstone of VANET (Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks) system, vehicles need to have awareness information about other vehicles in the vicinity for safe driving. In this paper, we propose a lightweight geocast-based piggybacking mechanism for cooperative awareness applications in VANET. We leverage only one-hop beacons to construct both local and extended traffic views for drivers. Since multi-hop communication does not scale well, consequently our proposed scheme only exploits single-hop beacons to provide the same comparable functionality as multi-hop communication would do. The goal is achieved at the expense of a small piece of additional information (traffic classes) in the scheduled beacons. Geocast-based piggybacking has a twofold advantage over traditional flooding-based approaches; it serves as virtual multi-hop communication paradigm and it avoids broadcast storm problem.