Group Formation Through Cooperating Nodes

Abstract. Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) will play a vital role in the future road safety and comfort. The lack of centralized infrastruc-ture and high node mobility and number of vehicles generate problems such as interrupting connections, difficult routing, security of communi-cations and scalability. Groups are here proposed as a solution to avoid data collisions by decreasing the number of connections exchanged among vehicles. To reach this goal, nodes should cooperate with each other. They should form groups or join a group depending on their state. This paper provides a global vision of the life cycle of cooperative nodes that form groups and a description of how to deal with the information within a group. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme reduces the number of communications, avoiding data loss due to collisions. Key words: cooperation, group, simulation.