Cooperative parking space allocation in vehicular ad hoc networks

By exchanging events in a vehicular ad hoc network, drivers can receive interesting information while driving. For example, they can be informed of available parking spaces in their vicinity. Obviously, a suitable protocol is needed to disseminate the events efficiently within the area where they are relevant. Moreover, in such a competitive context where each vehicle may be interested in the resource, it is crucial not to broadcast that resource to each driver in the vicinity. Otherwise, those drivers would waste time trying to reach a parking space and only one of them would be satisfied, which would lead to a poor satisfaction in the system. To solve this problem, we propose a reservation protocol to allocate parking spaces in vehicular ad hoc networks that avoids the competition among the vehicles. In this paper, we present the basic ideas of our proposal.