Self-organized and Context-Adaptive Information Diffusion in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks are considered as technology enabler for new automotive telematics services. In particular, those networks will enable foresighted active safety applications. However, in order to guarantee fast market introduction, a large variety of different applications with different traffic patterns must be supported. Due to the strict limitation of the available bandwidth in ad hoc networks, it is likely that in many situations the channel capacity is not sufficient to satisfy all transmission requests of all vehicles. However, a situation adaptive and self-organized utilization of the ad hoc network can optimize the overall utility of the deployed applications in the participating vehicles. Thereby, channel access is coordinated in a way that those data packets can access the channel first that provide the biggest expected utility for other vehicles in a specific situation. In this paper we delineate the effects of this implicit and situation adaptive information diffusion strategy and show that neither an explicit dissemination area or message life time is necessary.