Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Report : Wireless Networks

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CONTENTS

Topic Page No.

1. INTRODUCTION TO AD-HOC NETWORKS 3-4

2. OPPORTUNITIES 5-6

3. VANETS 7

4. OVERVIEW OF VANET SECURITY 8

5. SCALABILITY OF VANETS 9-10

6. TBMAC PROTOCOL 10-11

7. CONCLUSION 12

8. BIBLOGRAPHY 12
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1. Introduction to AD-HOC NETWORKS

In recent years, mobile computing has enjoyed a tremendous rise in popularity. The continued
miniaturization of mobile computing devices and the extraordinary rise of processing power
available in mobile laptop computers combine to put more and better computer-based
applications into the hands of a growing segment of the population. At the same time, the
markets for wireless telephones and communication devices are experiencing rapid growth. The
rise of wireless telephony will change what it means to be in touch; already many people use
their oce telephone for taking messages while they are away and rely on their mobile telephone
for more important or timely messages. Indeed, mobile phones are used for tasks as simple and
as convenient as nding ones associates in a crowded shopping mall or at a conference. A
similar transformation awaits mobile computer users, and we can expect new applications to be
built for equally mundane but immediately convenient uses. Much of the context for the
transformation has to do with keeping in touch with the Internet. We expect to have the
network at our disposal for the innumerable little conveniences that we have begun to integrate
into our professional lives. We might wish to download a roadmap on the spur of the moment so
that we can see what is available in the local area. We might wish to have driving suggestions
sent to us, based on information from the global positioning system (GPS) in our car, using the
services oered by various web sites. The combination of suciently fast and inexpensive
wireless communication links and cheap mobile computing devices makes this a reality for many
people today. In the future, the average traveler is likely to take such services for granted.

An ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes dynamically forming a temporary

network without the use of existing network infra-structure or centralized administration. Due to
the limited transmission range of wireless network interfaces, multiple network hops may be
needed for one node to exchange data with another across the network. In such a network, each
mobile node operate not only as a host but also as a router, forwarding packets for other mobile
nodes in the network, that may not be within the direct reach wireless transmission range of each
other. Each node participates in an ad hoc routing protocol that allows it to discover multi hop
paths through the network to any other node. The idea of an ad hoc network is sometimes also
called an infrastructure-less networking, since the mobile nodes in the network dynamically
establish routing among themselves to form their own network on the fly.

Ad hoc networks in which no centralized static station or infrastructure is supported are gaining
increasing popularity. Due to mobility, the topology of the networks changes continuously and
wireless links break down and reorganize frequently. These features cause traditional real-time
communication protocols to be inapplicable in a mobile setting. The increasing research of real-
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time communication in Mobile Ad Hoc Wireless Networks (MANETs) is to enable distributed

applications among mobile nodes in infrastructure-free environments. Vehicular Ad Hoc
Networks (VANETs) characterized by nodes with relatively high mobility and various disturbed
environments represent a number of remarkable challenge dissimilar to MANETs. Applications
of inter-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside wireless communication that make use of VANETs
require reliable communication that provides a guarantee of real-time message propagation.
Nowadays, most of researches in VANETs domain concentrate on the development of layered
communication protocols.
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2. OPPORTUNITIES
Let us look at the opportunities. If vehicles can directly communicate with each other and with
infrastructure, an entirely new paradigm for vehicle safety applications can be created. Even
other non-safety applications can greatly enhance road and vehicle efciency. Second, new
challenges are created by high vehicle speeds and highly dynamic operating environments.
Third, new requirements, necessitated by new safety-of-life applications, include new
expectations for high packet delivery rates and low packet latency. Further, customer acceptance
and governmental oversight bring very high expectations of privacy and security.

Even today, vehicles generate and analyze large amounts of data, although typically this data is
self-contained within a single vehicle. With a VANET, the horizon of awareness for the vehicle
or driver drastically increases. The VANET communication can be either done directly between
vehicles as one-hop communication, or vehicles can retransmit messages, thereby enabling
multihop communication. To increase coverage or robustness of communication, relays at the
roadside cabe deployed. Roadside infrastructure can also be used as a gateway to the Internet
and, thus, data and context information can be collected, stored and processed somewhere, e.g.,
in upcoming Cloud infrastructures. It warrants repeating that the interest in vehicular inter-
networks is strongly motivated by the wealth of applications that could be enabled. First of all,
active safety applications, i.e., accident prevention applications, would benet from this most
direct form of communication. Second, by collecting trafc status data from a wider area, trafc
ow could be improved, travel times could be reduced as well as emissions from the vehicles. As
it was concisely stated as the tenet of the Intelligent Transportation System World Congress in
2008: save time, save lives. The application classes Safety and Efciency can be used to
classify applications based on their primary purpose. However, the aspects of safety and
efciency cannot be seen as completely disjoint sets of features. Obviously, vehicle crashes can
lead to trafc jams. A message reporting an accident can be seen as a safety message from the
perspective of near-by vehicles. The same message can be seen by further-away vehicles as an
input to calculate an alternative route within a transport efciency application
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AD HOC NETWORKS : FROM CELLULAR TO VANETS

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3. VANETs
With the development of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks
(VANETs) become an emerging research area. As a specific type of MANETs, VANETs have
some similar characteristics to MANETs, e.g. short radio transmission range, low bandwidth,
omni-directional broadcast and limited storage capacity. In addition to these similarities, the
communication in VANETs meets some particular challenging characteristics:

1) Rapid topology changes;

2) Frequent network partition;

3) Small effective network diameter;

4) Limited redundancy in time and in function.

5) Position predictability

6) Relatively sufficient power

Position predictability and relatively sufficient power may be utilized to give support to inter-
vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside communication, while rapid topology changes, frequent network
partition, small effective network diameter and limited redundancy in time and in function
aggravate the difficulties to communication in VANETs

There are also multimedia and internet connectivity facilities for passengers, all provided
within the wireless coverage of each car. Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks are expected to
implement variety of wireless technologies such as Dedicated Short Range Communications
(DSRC) which is a type of WiFi. Other candidate wireless technologies are Cellular, Satellite,
and WiMAX. Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks can be viewed as component of the Intelligent
Transportation Systems (ITS). Developing applications and protocols for VANETs poses
unique security challenges, induced by the devices being used, the high speed and sporadic
connectivity of the vehicles and the high relevance of their geographic position.
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4. Overview of VANET SECURITY

The goal of VANET is safer transportation and more comfort for the passengers, thus a special
electronic device will be placed inside each vehicle which will provide Ad-Hoc Network
connectivity for the passengers. This network tends to operate without any infra-structure or
legacy client and server communication. Each vehicle equipped with VANET device will be a
node in the AdHoc network and can receive and transmit others messages through the wireless
network. Collision warning, road sign alarms and in-place traffic view will give the driver
essential tools to decide the best path along the way. Security of inter-vehicular communication
has been ignored so far by the research community mostly of the complexity the problem can
reach in just a few assumptions.

Overview of VANET Security

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5. Scalability in VANETs
In large and especially distributed systems or networks, scalability is a very crucial
characteristic. Scalability is defined as the ability to handle the addition of nodes or objects
without suffering a noticeable loss in performance or increase in administrative complexity. In
the VANET scenario, scalability issues arise in several different contexts. The number of active
nodes (vehicles) has an impact on network connectivity and on the likelihood of congestion on
the wireless channel. In addition, protocol design has a great impact on scalability. The most
crucial bottleneck is the bandwidth limitation. The number of messages which have to be sent
over the shared medium is predominantly influenced by the number of vehicles and the number
of applications deployed in these vehicles. However, network load is additionally influenced by
the fact that active safety messages have to be rebroadcast within their target area for the
duration of their validity. This ensures the availability of the message for new vehicles entering
the area after the initial broadcast. The so-called stored geocast has been presented in [3] and
leads to additional data messages to keep the information available. The basic dissemination
scheme used to realize broadcast-based VANETs is the so-called flooding, where each node
rebroadcasts every single message it receives. The main problem inherent to the flooding
mechanism is the huge amount of superfluous transmissions leading to network congestion. This
effect is aggravated with an increasing node density and network size, leading to the scalability
problem. Hence, the limited network resources are partially absorbed by redundant traffic, while
highly relevant and time-critical messages are prevented from accessing the medium.
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The above figure explains the need for a relevance based data dissemination approach. The two
vehicles 1 and 2 are within mutual radio range for only a short time because of shadowing effects
caused by the surrounding buildings. Vehicle 2 has several messages in its message queue for
transmission. Since it will not be able to transmit all messages to vehicle 1 before it leaves its
transmission range, it should select the most relevant messages and thus maximize the
application benefit. In order to do this, it is necessary to calculate a relevance for each message
and to reorganize the vehicles message queue accordingly. Besides the direct transmission, it is
also possible to use a multi hop connection with vehicle 3. However, this leads to worse channel
utilization and a higher latency.

6. TBMAC Protocol
Protocols in which stations listen for a carrier and act accordingly are called carrier sense
protocols. CSMA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access) is a representative carrier sense protocol.
MACA (Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance) is designed for the sender to stimulate the
receiver into outputting a short frame, so stations nearby can detect this transmission and avoid
transmitting for the duration of the upcoming (large) data frame. CSMA and MACA, the most
renowned contention-based MAC protocols, both employ an exponentially increasing back-off
counter to deal with contention and collisions. In contention-based protocols, fairness to access
the medium is promoted and mobile stations do not need to maintain consistent state information
for scheduling access. Moreover, there is no restriction required in the number of stations for
contention-based MAC protocols. However, on the other hand, because of the relatively high
possibility of collision and contention in package transmission and the hidden terminal problem,
they are not suitable for use in real time communication applications of multi-hop ad hoc
networks.

Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) is a collision-free MAC protocol that equally divides
the packet delivery time period into a number of slots. Only one station is allowed to transmit
data packets in each slot. Thus collision and contention in packet transmission can be avoided.
The transmission delay also can be predictable because TDMA demands a known upper bound
on the number of stations in the network.

TBMAC is based on the above time division MAC protocol that provides mobile stations a
predictable probability and time-bound to access the shared wireless medium in multi-hop ad hoc
networks. In TBMAC, a certain geographical area is divided into a number of cells, for example,
hexagons of equal size, as shown in figure x. Each cell employs a distinct radio channel.
Location information, e.g. GPS, is used to ascertain cell boundaries. The advantage of the
method is to maximize the spatial reusage of the network.
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Figure x) Cells

In a similar way to the IEEE 802.11 standard, the TBMAC protocol divides the

whole time for access to the medium into two distinct time periods:

Contention Free Period (CFP)

Contention Periods (CP)

Mobile stations, which have no allocated CFP slots, contend and negotiate an agreement on slot
allocation in the CP and transmit data packets using the allocated slots in the CFP. The CFP and
CP constitute a TBMAC cycle. In a TBMAC cycle, medium access in the CFP is similar to
TDMA, while in the CP it is similar to CSMA.
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7. Conclusion
The convergence of computing, telecommunications (xed and mobile), and various kinds of
services are enabling the deployment of different kinds of VANET technologies. In the past
decade, many VANET projects around the world have been undertaken and several VANET
standards have been developed to improve vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to infrastructure
communications. There are certain challenges that still need to be addressed in order to enable
the deployment of VANET technologies, infrastructures, and services cost-effectively, securely,
and reliably.

8. Biblography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_ad-hoc_network
http://vnt.disi.unitn.it/downloads.php
http://www-personal.engin.umd.umich.edu/~vnsrl/
http://www.vanetbook.com/
http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/66/04707405/0470740566.pdf
http://www.csie.ntpu.edu.tw/~yschen/mypapers/TS-2010-1-2.pdf
http://lca.epfl.ch/projects/ivc
http://www.cs.odu.edu/~mweigle/papers/choudhary-ms-proj-07.pdf