A two-tier VANET/P2P system for information retrieval in vehicular environments

With advances in information and communication technologies, vehicles on roads can cooperatively share and retrieve information in a distributed manner to support Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) services such as traffic management and infotainment services. A system is needed to retrieve information and data from moving vehicles and roadside facilities in an efficient manner. However, existing distributed vehicular systems rely on either vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) or application-layer peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols over an infrastructure-based wireless network suffering from low success rate or long latency in information retrieval. In this work, we propose a two-tier VANET/P2P system that integrates low-tier VANETs and a high-tier infrastructure-based P2P overlay. The proposed two-tier system aims to achieve high success rate, reduce latency, and minimize overhead for information retrieval in vehicular environments.