CarAgent: Collecting and disseminating floating car data in vehicular networks

Floating car data (FCD) refers to the motion and sensor data produced by moving vehicles on the road. Given that traffic management authorities and drivers can benefit from FCD enormously, there is an urgency to develop efficient FCD collection and dissemination techniques that scale with peak road traffic. In this paper, we present CarAgent, a message exchange protocol that periodically collects and uploads FCD to data centres with the minimal utilisation of existing mobile network resources. We also show how CarAgent can be easily extended to efficiently disseminate FCD to all vehicles in a target area using Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), a recently released wireless communication standard for vehicles. We analytically derive the key performance metrics of CarAgent and validate them with simulations. We evaluate CarAgent using microscopic simulation of road traffic in real street maps while incorporating wireless protocol details of Long Term Evolution (LTE) and DSRC. Simulation results confirm that, compared to the state-of-the-art, CarAgent consumes 50% less LTE resources for FCD collection. For FCD dissemination, CarAgent consumes 45% less DSRC resources while improving the speed of dissemination significantly.