Prioritizing travel time reports in peer-to-peer traffic dissemination

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) is a promising approach to the dissemination of spatio-temporal information such as the current traffic condition of a road segment or the availability of a parking space. Due to the constraint of the communication bandwidth, only a limited number of information items may be transmitted upon a vehicle-to-vehicle communication opportunity. Ranking becomes critical in this situation, by enabling the most important information to be transmitted under the bandwidth constraint. In this paper we propose a method for online learning of spatio-temporal information ranking for a travel time dissemination application within a VANET. In this method, vehicles judge the relevance of incoming information items and use them as training examples for Naive Bayesian learning. Additionally, a separate machine learning algorithm is used to estimate the probability of a duplicate item being transmitted. The method is used in place of commonly used heuristics, and is shown to be superior in the application of travel time dissemination.