An Intervehicular Communication Architecture for Safety and Entertainment

Inter-vehicle communication (IVC) is emerging in research prominence for the interest that is generating in all major car manufacturers and for the benefits that its inception will produce. The specific features of IVC will allow the deployment of a wide set of possible applications which span from road safety to entertainment. Even if, on the one hand, these applications share the common need for fast multi-hop message propagation, on the other hand, they possess distinct characteristics in terms of generated network traffic. The current research state of the art only proposes solutions specifically designed for a single application (or class) that are not directly extendable to a general IVC context. Instead, we claim that a privileged architecture exists, which is able to support the whole spectrum of application classes. To this aim, we propose a novel IVC architecture that adapts its functionalities to efficiently serve applications in quickly propagating their messages over a vehicular network. We conducted an extensive set of experiments that demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. As representative case studies, we considered two application classes that for their network traffic characteristics are at the opposite boundaries of the application spectrum: safety and entertainment.