Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Roadside Multi-Hop Communications for Vehicular Sensor Networks: Simulations and Field Trial

Using vehicles as sensors for traffic and environment monitoring is a new paradigm that opens the way to worthwhile applications. Data collected on board are usually delivered through the cellular network, with the consequent overloading risk. This paper focuses on the alternative adoption of short range vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-roadside (V2R) communications, with particular reference to the wireless access in vehicular environment (WAVE)/IEEE802.11p technology. Specifically, we propose and validate, through simulations in a urban scenario, a simple but effective routing algorithm to forward data through V2V and V2R communications. The benefits are quantified in terms of the amount of data that can be transmitted without using cellular resources. Furthermore, we present an urban field trial, deployed to test our proposed multi-hop algorithm, through the adoption of low cost hardware and open source software.