On the effectiveness of distributing information among vehicles using inter-vehicle communication

Recently, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) are becoming an important research topic. One goal of ITS is to distribute information among vehicles in a timely and efficient manner. In the ITS research community, inter-vehicle communications (IVC) is considered in a way that may be able to achieve this goal. An information network built on top of vehicles using IVC can be viewed as a type of mobile ad hoc networks. Although several information and distribution protocols for mobile ad hoc networks have been proposed, how well they can be applied to an IVC network is still poorly studied. For this reason, based on reasonable vehicle traces generated by a microscopic traffic simulator, this paper studies the effectiveness of distributing information among vehicles using multi-hop inter-vehicle communications.