Power Efficient Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Audrey Knowlton (New York institute of Technology), Sterling Holcomb (Georgia Southern University), Juan Guerra (University of California, Merced)

Communication between vehicles is a growing platform for transferring safety information. The highly mobile nature of Vehicle to Vehicle communications causes rapid changes in topologies and propagation conditions. Since the advent of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks, over fifty routing protocols with attendant topologies have been proposed for these networks. These protocols can be simulated successfully; however, some use an excessive amount of power. Our approach seeks to reduce power consumption with a simplified routing protocol. it also aims to improve topology by dimensional reduction; each car is aware of only two types of connections, up road and down-road. We also propose a fuzzy logic algorithm that vehicles use to predict the location of up-road cars in order to form links to the nearest relevant vehicles without using a great deal of power. Once these links have been established, up-road vehicles will send data down-road for a length of time based on the relative speed of the two vehicles. After this time period has expired the down- road vehicle must request additional information, restarting the timer. Data sent through the network will include information on up-road vehicles and when required, messages such as accident, alerts, and traffic warnings. This research describes an approach to VANETs that reduces power usage by simplifying the network topology and predicting node locations during the linking process.