Information sharing service in VANETs with enhanced two-tier P2P communications

Intelligent transportation system (ITS) brings about opportunities of multiple services for moving vehicles. This paper mainly discusses the innovative P2P information sharing service in ITS. Existing systems mainly rely on either the vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) or application-layer peer-to-peer protocol (P2P) over a broadband wireless network, which usually suffer from low lookup success rate, high lookup latency and extra overhead of the P2P network maintenance. In our work, we first analyzed a two-tier VANET/P2P architecture, then proposed an enhanced model, in which the head selection and lookup mechanisms of the P2P access process were adjusted based on the link duration, relative velocity and location of Peers´. Simulation results show that our system could heighten the efficiency and stability of VANET/P2P information interaction, while keeping the compromise between lookup success rate, latency and maintenance cost.