Push-pull based critical information gathering in VANETs: Multi agent system based approach

Today´s vehicles have the capability of sensing, computing, and communicating capabilities. Different components in the vehicle constantly exchange the available information with other vehicles on the road and cooperate for the purpose of ensuring safety and comfort, known as vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). VANETs are a specific type of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) that are currently attracting the attention of researchers around the world. With pervasiveness of mobile computing technology and wireless communications, VANETs could be a key networking technology of the future vehicle communications. In VANETs, critical informations like navigation, cooperative collision avoidance, lane-changing, speed limit, accident, obstacle or road condition warnings, etc. plays a significant role for safety-related applications. Such kind of critical information gathering is challenging, because of their delay-critical nature. In order to gather critical informations efficiently dynamic time sensitive algorithms are necessary. In this position paper we have introduced a new multi agent (combination of heavy-weight static and light-weight mobile agents) based push-pull algorithm that probabilistically considers the push and pull operations for critical information gathering, depending on the information relevance and importance. The push and pull probabilities of informations are computed dynamically, without any prior knowledge. The main contribution of our work lies in the efficiency of the algorithm in gathering the information with minimum time. The time taken to gather the information by a vehicle is modeled analytically.