A traffic incident management framework for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) support the information dissemination among vehicles, Roadside Units (RSUs), and a Trust Authority (TA). A trust model evaluates an entity or data or both to determine truthfulness. A security model confirms authentication, integrity, availability, non repudiation issues. With these aspects in mind, many models have been proposed in literature. Furthermore, many information dissemination approaches are proposed. However, the lack of a model that can manage traffic incidents completely inspires this work. This paper details how and when a message needs to be generated and relayed so that the incidents can be reported and managed in a timely manner. This paper addresses this challenge by providing a traffic incident management model to manage several traffic incidents efficiently. Additionally, we simulate this model using the VEINS simulator with vehicles, RSUs, and a TA. From the experiments, we measure the average number of transmissions required for reporting a single traffic incident while varying the vehicle density and relaying considerations. We consider two types of relaying. In one series of experiments, messages from regular vehicles and RSUs are relayed up to four hops. In another series of experiments, messages from the regular vehicles and RSUs are relayed until their generation time reaches sixty seconds. Additionally, messages from the official vehicles are relayed when they approach an incident or when the incident is cleared. Results from the simulations show that more vehicles are informed with four-hop relaying than sixty-second relaying in both cases.