SmartVANET: The Case for a Cross-Layer Vehicular Network Architecture

Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) based Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) provides an opportunity to enable communication-based cooperative safety systems in order to decrease road traumas and improve traffic efficiency. VANET also offers a wide range of commercial and infotainment applications. VANET exhibits unique characteristics that create new challenges. This paper discusses the DSRC technology and its shortcomings in order to achieve reliable content dissemination. To optimise the performance of the vehicular networks, a novel network architecture using the cross-layer paradigm is presented. The architecture is called Smart Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (SmartVANET) architecture. The proposed SmartVANET architecture can support safety, traffic management and commercial applications. The SmartVANET architecture complies with the DSRC channel plan. The architecture divides road into segments and assigns a service channel to each segment. The SmartVANET combines a segment based clustering technique with a hybrid Medium Access Control (MAC) mechanism (termed as the Smart MAC protocol). Using cross-layer integration, SmartVANET also provides a solution for broadcast storm problems and offers scalability. The paper presents the SmartVANET architecture and argues its advantages.