A Study of Distributed Traffic Information Acquisition Based on Clustered VANET

Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC), which combines traditional traffic theory and network technology together, has drawn increasing research interests in recent years. This paper proposes a prototype of distributed traffic information acquisition based on IVC. Here, equipped vehicles act as moving sensors and form a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) which takes charge of traffic information acquisition, sharing and fusion. Road-side stations as local access points can collect distributed real-time traffic information and upload it to superior network Traffic Management Centers (TMC). In this paper, a complete analysis and comparison on traffic information acquisition based on clustered VANET and common multi-hop VANET is studied, including the total network load, routing methods etc. And we also establish a simulation platform to realize and validate all these methods or systems. Finally, a clustered network structure is recommended because of its more utilization of network resource and better communication quality.