Design and evaluation of a two-tier peer-to-peer traffic information system

Decentralized traffic information systems realize real-time traffic information services without the need for a server infrastructure. However, existing systems rely on either the vehicular ad hoc network or application-layer peer-to-peer protocols over a broadband wireless network suffering from low lookup success rate, high lookup latency, and maintenance overhead of the P2P network. This article proposes a two-tier VANET/P2P architecture that exploits both VANET and P2P technology. In the low tier, vehicles form a VANET via intervehicle communication to exchange traffic information. On top of the VANET, a portion of the vehicles further establish a P2P overlay through a broadband wireless infrastructure to mitigate the disconnectivity problems of the VANET. Simulation results demonstrate that the two-tier architecture can significantly improve the lookup success rate compared to the single-tier VANET systems while reducing lookup latency and maintenance overhead compared to the single-tier P2P systems.