CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

1.1 VANETS

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks are employed by Intelligent Transport Systems (ITSs) to operate
wireless communications in the vehicular environments. These are designed to provide a reliable
and safe environment for users by reducing the road accidents, traffic jams, and fuel
consumptions, and so on. The VANETs’ users can be informed of hazardous situations by
vehicular communications and exchanging the information about surrounding environments [1],
[2]. VANETs are a type of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). The vehicles in VANETs are
similar to the mobile nodes in the MANETs. Although VANETs inherit most of the
characteristics of MANETs, VANETs have some unique characteristics such as high mobility,
high rate of topology changes, and high density of the network, and so on. Thus, VANETs have
different characteristics in comparison with MANETs [1], [3]-[7].

Congestion occurs in the channels when these channels are saturated by the nodes competing to
acquire the channels. Indeed, by increasing the vehicle density, the number of channel collisions
increases occurrence of congestion in the network. The occurrence of congestion increases the
delay and packet loss (especially for safety messages) leading to mitigation of the VANETs’
performance [8]-[11]. To guarantee the reliability and safety of the vehicular communications,
and to improve the performance of VANETs, Quality of Service (QoS) should be supported.
Controlling congestion is an effective way that should be employed to support the QoS [2], [4].
By controlling the congestion, the delay and packet loss and consequently the performance of
VANET can be improved that help have a safer and more reliable environment for VANETs’
users [8]-[12].

The ever-increasing traffic density requires more effective traffic control technique to avoid the
serious traffic jam. Intelligent transportation system (ITS) provides innovative transport and
traffic management technique. So far, a number of research efforts have been devoted to traffic
congestion detection in both infrastructure mode and infrastructure-free mode. And these
protocols aim to monitor road traffic and to estimate vehicle speed, density, and the arrival time
[12–15]. Basically, sensing devices such as induction loop detectors, infrared detectors [16],
microwave radars [17], and video recording devices [18] can be utilized to monitor vehicles on
the highway. However, the coverage of long highway with the aforementioned dedicated devices
becomes too expensive to afford the huge installations of these sensor devices. Compared to the
aforementioned infrastructure method, the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) provides us a
cost-effective infrastructure-free technique to support a variety of ITS applications, such as
safety surveillance, road monitoring, traffic flow management, and vehicle density estimation
[19,20]. In the framework of the VANET, each vehicle acts as a sensor node to collect
information for transportation congestion estimate. However, there are several technical
problems that need to be addressed.

Basically, a reasonable information exchange mechanism among moving vehicles will be the
basis to realize the traffic monitoring in the VANET framework. The direct adaptation of
VANETs for traffic detection looks attractive, but it has to cope with challenges like bandwidth
flooding and duplication [21], delay and inaccurate traffic evaluation [22], and the reliability
problems [23]. In [13], the contents oriented communication (COC) protocol was proposed for
traffic congestion and accident detection. Whenever a vehicle receives a packet, it calculates the
congestion and estimates speed by itself. By exchanging the calculated results, the COC offers a
feasible scheme to gather real-time position for congestion detection and speed estimation.
Nonetheless, too many content exchanges in the COC protocol will consume high bandwidth.
Efficient congestion detection (ECODE) protocol was proposed for VANET in [24] to evaluate
traffic characteristics as well. However, ECODE uses multi hop communications and geocast
principles to collect and analyze vehicle data for each road section, which will lead to high
bandwidth consumption, overhead, and complexity issues.

1.2 Architecture of VANETs

Figure 1 depicts three district domains of VANETs including In-vehicle domain, Ad hoc domain,
and infrastructure domain. In-vehicle domain is formed of OBUs. Each vehicle is considered to
be equipped with OBU. Short range wireless communication is generated by OBUs for safety
and non-safety communications. The second domain is Ad hoc domain which is composed of
OBUs and RSUs. One mobile ad hoc network can be considered between OBUs that makes
inter-vehicle communications. OBUs communications can be conducted by one-hop
communication or multi-hop communications that depend on the applications generating these
communications [25], [26]. The third domain is Infrastructure domain that is composed by RSUs
and Hotspots (HS). Infrastructure domain is employed to access the safety and non-safety
applications. RSUs provide internet access, and HS is considered for low controlled
environments. In the case that RSUs or HSs cannot provide internet access, OBUs can employ
integrated cellular networks including General packet radio service (GPRS), Global System for
Mobile Communications (GSM), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), 4G,
and WiMAX [25], [26].