Population Protocols for Adaptive Event Dissemination with Autonomous Agents in Vehicular Networks

Recent advances in distributed vehicle-to-vehicle communication promise to transform the user’s driving ex- perience, providing new services capable of improving safety, efficiency and quality of travelling. Due to the large amount of information exchanged, a major challenge of Vehicular Networks is the adoption of appropri- ate data dissemination protocols that ensure good performance in real-time event detection, while guarantee- ing low communication overhead. To this aim, this paper proposes an adaptive event dissemination algorithm which exploits Population Protocols (PPs) for modelling vehicle interactions as coordinated behaviors of au- tonomous agents in a distributed system. The experimental evaluation performed on realistic vehicle tracks over real-world maps demonstrates the system’s ability to efficiently disseminate information in the network in order to support reliable and distributed event detection services.