Multi-hop data harvesting in vehicular sensor networks

Vehicular sensor networks (VSN) has recently become a hot research topic in the field of wireless networking, as this promising technology has potentials to provide variety of applications and safety to drivers on the road. As promising it is, VSN also introduces many new challenges to the table. For example, the vehicle mobility creates a very unique topology with frequent network disconnections, which may pose problems when existing network protocols for general ad hoc networks are applied. Majority of the research related with VSN limit their data harvesting schemes to only single-hop or short distance transmissions. Therefore these works cannot meet real-time requirements nor support applications where data must be transmitted in multi-hop. The authors believe such problems can be alleviated by our proposed scheme, named 'multi-hop data harvesting' (MDH). The simulation studies conducted using QualNet 4.0 simulator shows the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.