Our solution for data dissemination in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) has been finally published in the January 2012 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. The so-called ABSM protocol (aka AckPBSM) can be employed to implement a variety of vehicular services such as advertisements of points of interest, traffic management applications, and collaborative safety services, among others. However, our last paper on the subject focuses on non-safety services where delay-critical applications are not on target.
ABSM takes advantage of periodic beacons issued by vehicles to piggyback acknowledgments of the messages which are being disseminated. Such a simple strategy makes the protocol improve the reliability of the dissemination task, while it dramatically increases efficiency in common vehicular scenarios.
I expect to continue my work on ABSM in a month or so. First, I’d like to further simplify the protocol specification. In addition, I plan to include some modifications that can make ABSM a suitable solution for any kind of data dissemination in VANET, regardless the criticality of the data being transmitted.