A multi-antenna switched links based inter-vehicular network architecture

In recent years, there have been significant research efforts related to vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. The major demand of the V2V communication is originally from safety-related applications; other possible application areas including communication support for traffic management have increased. In this paper, we propose an architectural framework for achieving a vehicle network that employs dynamically switched directional links. This serves to address channel contention associated with omni-directional antenna based network architecture and leads to a simple protocol specification for V2V communication. We propose new data dissemination methods that leverage the unique characteristics of the dynamic switched directional links based architecture. The tradeoffs of the proposed framework and dissemination methods are also discussed.