Road Probing: RSU Assisted Data Collection in Vehicular Networks

With the adoption of sensing technology, vehicles are able to gather information about driver's environment, like speed, temperature, moisture and road condition, etc. The state-of-the-art wireless technologies also provide vehicles with the ability of communicating to their neighboring vehicles on the road, as well as the static frameworks on the road side. Vehicular Sensor Network (VSN) is an emerging paradigm in vehicular networks. In this paper, we propose a new VSN scenario, Road Probing. The Road Side Unit (RSU) initiates the probing process and selects the passing by vehicles as probes to collect traffic and environment information. The selected vehicles sense the desired data and forward it back to the RSU in a multi-hop fashion. A dynamically growing one-dimension probing chain originated from the RSU is formed by participated vehicles as the probing process going on. A mobility profile based probe selection method is developed to improve this chain's connectivity as it's the key issue to assure the quality of data collection. The performance of Road Probing is demonstrated by simulation experiments.