FleaNet: A Virtual Market Place on Vehicular Networks

Over recent years, mobile Internet devices such as laptops, PDAs, smart phones etc, have become extremely popular and widespread. Once on board of a vehicle, these devices can automatically connect to the vehicle processor and thus greatly amplify the communications and processing capabilities available to the owner in a "pedestrian mode". We envision that this "amplification" opportunity will be one of the drivers of car to car and car to curb communications. In fact, the car communications system will not be used exclusively for mobile Internet access, but also as a distributed platform for the "opportunistic" cooperation among people with shared interests/goals. Exchanging safety messages among vehicles is a compelling example. Stretching opportunistic cooperation well beyond safety messages, we discuss in this paper the concept of virtual "flea market" over VANET called FleaNet. In FleaNet, customers, either mobile (i.e., vehicles) or stationary (i.e., pedestrians, roadside shop owner), express their demands/offers, e.g., want to buy or sell an item, via radio queries. These queries are opportunistically disseminated exploiting in part the mobility of other customers in order to find the customer/vendor with matching needs/resources. In the paper we identify the key performance metrics, namely query resolution latency, scalability, and mobility. Based on the metrics, using models and simulation, we show that FleaNet can efficiently support a market place over vehicular networks