Structure-Less Message Aggregation (SLMA): Reliably and Efficiently Improve Information Precision and Certainty for VANETs

In VANETs, message aggregation is crucial to reduce information redundancy and communication overhead. In addition, it can effectively decrease the information inaccuracy from the on-board sensors. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, event driven structure-less message aggregation (SLMA), for safety-relevant VANET applications. The key motive of SLMA is to reliably and efficiently improve information accuracy and reduce communication overhead with limited delay at the same time. To our best knowledge, this is the first paper to address these goals of message aggregation simultaneously in VANETs. Using multiple level parallel fusion model to provide high reliability, the structure-less aggregation framework eliminates packet exchanges for aggregation structure formation and maintenance. Bayesian fusion algorithm is adopted to effectively achieve precise event detection on the road. Simulation results show that SLMA scheme efficiently reduces the communication overhead with reasonable delay. Meanwhile, it can greatly improve information accuracy.