Information Management in Emergent Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

ABSTRACT: Information Exchange and communication among vehicles has become a very practical, interesting and challenging problem in Vehicular Networks. Since vehicles are in ad-hoc and rapidly mobile mode, there is no way for fixed network topologies. This necessitates the need for novel mechanisms for efficient data management in Vehicular Networks. Caching and Replication are two common approaches taken to ensure efficient data access. Though replicated items provide faster data access, identification of the location of a replica, placing the replica in the appropriate location and retrieving the needed data from replicas, becomes a big challenge in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks. We will discuss our preliminary framework for information management issues in emergent vehicular networks in this article. 1. OVERVIEW Information Management among participating vehicles in a Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is an emerging area of interest to the research community. Applications include file exchanges, commercial dissemination, emergency warning, automatic cruise control etc. A host of research works have appeared in this including information retrieval [1], incentive management [2], data aggregation [3] etc. In the realm of VANETs, there are several issues that make information management saliently different from that in typical Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Unlike WSNs, nodes i