Geo-localized virtual infrastructure for urban vehicular networks

Supporting future large-scale vehicular networks is expected to require a combination of fixed roadside infrastructure (e.g. Road Side Units, RSU) and mobile in-vehicle technologies (e.g. On Board Units, OBU). The need for an infrastructure, however, considerably decreases the deployment area of VANET applications. In this paper, we propose a self-organizing mechanism to emulate a geo-localized virtual infrastructure (GVI). This latter is emulated by a bounded-size subset of vehicles currently populating the geographic region where the virtual infrastructure is to be deployed. The GVI is designed in order to help the efficient support of dissemination-based applications. It can also be very useful in several ITS applications. Simulation results show that the proposed GVI mechanism can periodically disseminate the data within an intersection area, efficiently utilize the limited bandwidth and ensure a high delivery ratio.