Evaluating the Performance of Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks

There are several kinds of envisioned vehicular applications: video delivery, accidents detection, dissemination of traffic announcements, and so forth. Such applications demand minimal (and possibly distinct) Quality of Service guarantees that must couple the vehicular network. Since the vehicular networks will become reality soon, we demand strategies for planning and managing such networks. In this work we propose the concept of a Delta Network: the Delta Network is a metric for evaluating the performance of heterogeneous vehicular networks. By using the concept of a Network Delta, we expect network providers being able to measure and compare the performance of distinct heterogeneous vehicular networks (Delta is technology-independent). Finally, the concept of a Delta Network may also be applied to couple vehicular applications and vehicular networks in order to support the network provider in the decision of deploying (or not) a novel vehicular application.