Using passive RFID tags for vehicle-assisted data dissemination in intelligent transportation systems

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) in the form of vehicular adhoc networks (VANETs) have engaged significant interest from the academic, industry and government sectors. Data dissemination is of the utmost importance for the day-to-day operation of ITS applications. Numerous standards, architectures and communication protocols have been anticipated for data diffusion in ITS applications. However, existing schemes are based on an essential condition that the relaying vehicle has to be equipped with an active communication module - termed Intelligent Vehicle (IV). One of the major drawbacks of these schemes is that they do not exploit the potentially large number of non-intelligent vehicles (non-IVs), i.e., the vehicles without any active communication module for relaying and diffusion purposes. In this paper, we fill this gap by proposing a novel data dissemination scheme utilizing a non-IV to act as a data ferry. The non-IV is tagged with a low-cost passive RFID tag whereas the IV is equipped with an embedded RFID reader. The non-IVs ubiquitously store and carry the events in the passive tags, as recorded by the IV or by the roadside equipment, as they maneuver around the city blocks. Two system configurations, namely co-operative and stand-alone with and without vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) support, respectively, are also proposed. Simulation results show the proposed scheme´s effectiveness and performance superiority over the existing active-based data dissemination methods.