Driving Hazards Message Propagation Using Road Side Infrastructure in VANETs

VANET is a special form of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) where the moving nodes are vehicles. Vehicles on the highway can encounter hazardous driving condition like slippery road, road blocks, hairpin curves and other unexpected obstacles. Speedy delivery of such information to other vehicles can help to prevent road accidents and improve passenger safety. The traffic on the highways may not be dense and hence vehicle-to-vehicle communication will not satisfy the requirements. In this paper, we propose the use of Road Side InfrastrUcture (RSU) for propagating the safety message to nearby vehicles travelling in the direction of the road hazard. Vehicles coming across such dangerous road condition will communicate the information to the nearest RSUs. RSUs will selectively forward these messages to other relevant RSUs which in turn will propagate the message to vehicles approaching the unsafe road areas. RSUs use aggregation strategy in order to reduce redundancy, and network overhead. As vehicles would normally travel at high speed on the highways, propagation over a longer distance is required to avoid accidents, ensure passenger safety and prevent vehicular damage.