Cars as Roadside Units: A Cooperative Solution

The gradual penetration of Dedicated Short Range Communications Radio (DSRC) technology in the years to come is a formidable problem that could adversely affect the implementation of safety and non-safety applications. In this paper, we propose a solution that might mitigate the negative impact of the partial and gradual penetration problem of DSRC technology. The proposed solution is based on a self-organizing network paradigm that draws its inspiration from biological systems, such as social insect colonies [1]. By designing the local rules and a distributed algorithm needed to perform this function, it is shown that DSRC equipped cars can indeed serve as RSUs. Results show that the message reachability and connectivity in urban vehicular networks can be increased substantially in a cost-effective manner as the proposed approach does not entail deployment of infrastructure based RSUs.