A Link-Reliability-Based Approach to Providing QoS Support for VANETs

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks are a promising technology that provides several interesting new functionalities to drivers and passengers. These services are spread through a wide variety of applications, each with specific requirements in terms of latency, jitter and bandwidth, among other metrics. For this reason, it is crucial to provide mechanisms that can be used to offer different levels of communication quality in order to achieve reasonable performance in all services. In this paper, we demonstrate how link reliability may be used to support Quality of Service policies for any protocol based on unicast packets relay. This article is divided into two parts, the first of which describes how we estimate link reliability and evaluates how these estimations can be used to classify links into different groups with distinct quality. In the second part, this link reliability estimation model is used to group links into queues with different levels of expected transmission success ratios, which can be used to provide different quality levels depending on the requirements of each individual service. We show that the proposed mechanism adds little-to-none overhead to the overall network and provides an effective mean of supporting QoS in VANETs.