Information management in vehicular ad hoc networks: A review

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a highly mobile self-organizing network based on Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and hybrid architecture. Recently VANETs have gained a lot of attention by industry and academia due to wide range of applications including safety, convenience, commerce, entertainment and infotainment. Information management requires technologies and techniques for communication, fault tolerance, storage, coding, multi-modal interactions, gathering, aggregation, validation, dissemination, etc. In VANETs, information can be classified into safety and non-safety information. Driver or vehicle safety information is required in applications offering intelligent transport services like identification of road bends, traffic congestion, accident spots, collision warning, environmental conditions, approaching vehicles, etc. The major concerns in safety applications are reliability, security, trust, real time delivery, and latency. This paper brings out current research efforts on information management techniques employed for safety related applications in VANETs, which includes gathering, aggregation, validation and dissemination, and also provide directions for future research and development.