An Ad-Hoc Opportunistic Dissemination Protocol for Smartphone-Based Participatory Traffic Monitoring

This study introduces an ad-hoc opportunistic data dissemination protocol, called VADISS, that facilitates participatory traffic monitoring applications with smartphones. As a ubiquitous alternative to existing vehicular networking methods, VADISS uses the default WiFi interfaces universally adopted by today´s mobile devices. The routing is enabled with intermittent service advertisements and discoveries, and the data exchange is provided via built-in IEEE 802.11 beacon frames. VADISS orients neither association nor connection between devices, is not based on any road-side unit, and thus is readily available for vehicular end-use applications. Together with a smartphone-based online road monitoring application, VADISS has been tested in a real- traffic setup to assess the data dissemination performance. With the increasing coverage, quite promising efficiency has been reached, especially for routing of critical traffic information.