Exploiting Emergent Behavior for Inter-Vehicle Communication

The authors introduce Virtual Ferry Networking (VFN), a novel approach to data dissemination services on mobile adhoc networks. VFN exploits the emergent patterns of vehicles' mobility to buffer and carry messages when immediately forwarding those messages would fail. Instead of depending on a fixed, small set of vehicles and paths for ferrying messages, VFN allows any vehicle moving along part of a virtual route to become a possible carrier for messages. VFN helps address many of the challenges with supporting distributed applications in challenging ad-hoc vehicular networks with rapidly changing topologies, fast-moving vehicles and signal-weakening obstructions such as bridges and buildings. They discuss the challenges with implementing VFN and present evaluation results from an early prototype.