COL: a Data Collection Protocol for VANET

In this paper, we present a protocol to collect data within a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). In spite of the intrinsic dynamic of such network, our protocol simultaneously offers three relevant properties: (1) It allows any vehicle to collect data beyond its direct neighborhood (i.e., vehicles within direct communication range) using vehicle-to-vehicle communications only (i.e., the infrastructure is not required); (2) It tolerates possible network partitions; (3) It works on demand and stops when the data collection is achieved. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first collect protocol having these three characteristics. All that is chiefly obtained thanks to a specific tool, namely Operator ant, borrowed from the self-stabilization area which confers to our algorithm the nice property to recover by itself from topology changes. In addition to a theoretical proof of correctness, our protocol has been implemented and tested through the Airplug Software Distribution: Road and lab experiments are presented and discussed.