A scalable data dissemination protocol based on vehicles trajectories analysis

Since the last decade, the emergence of affordable wireless devices in vehicle ad-hoc networks has been a key step towards improving road safety as well as transport efficiency. Informing vehicles about interesting safety and non-safety events is of key interest. Thus, the design of an efficient data dissemination protocol has been of paramount importance. A careful scrutiny of the pioneering vehicle-to-vehicle data dissemination approaches highlights that geocasting is the most feasible approach for VANET applications, more especially in safety applications, since safety events are of interest mainly to vehicles located within a specific area, commonly called ZOR or Zone Of Relevance, close to the event. Indeed, the most challenging issue in geocast protocols is the definition of the ZOR for a given event dissemination. In this paper, we introduce a new geocast approach, called Data Dissemination Protocol based on Map Splitting (DPMS). The main thrust of DPMS consists of building the zones of relevance through the mining of correlations between vehicles' trajectories and crossed regions. To do so, we rely on the Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), which is a method of extracting interesting clusters from relational data. The performed experiments show that DPMS outperforms its competitors in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.