Efficient distribution of static or slowly changing configuration parameters in VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) based on Car2X communication technologies are about to enter mass production in the next years. Thereby, bandwidth efficiency is a core point of concern due to sharing of a single control channel among many participating stations with high mobility. Up to now, neighborhood aware content dissemination has only been considered for VANET security mechanisms, but not for other protocol layers. Thus, we show that extending on demand distribution of fixed or slowly changing data sets to all layers can reduce delay until full cooperative awareness about cooperating stations is achieved. Moreover, the developed strategy is able to reduce average bandwidth requirements. Thereby, the management entity foreseen in currently standardized VANET frameworks is used to coordinate content dissemination between different protocol layers. A simulation based evaluation is provided, which shows good performance of the proposed mechanism within the current ETSI ITS framework.