A Social Utility-Based Dissemination Scheme for Emergency Warning Messages in Vehicular Social Networks

Abstract

In recent years, many schemes have been proposed to disseminate Emergency Warning Messages (EWMs) in VANETs. However, various problems such as broadcast storm, hidden terminal and connectivity issues still persist to reduce the efficacy of these systems. In this paper, we propose a novel Social Utility-based Dissemination Scheme (SUDS) for Emergency Warning Messages in Vehicular Social Networks (VSNs). We utilize social properties of nodes such as centrality, interests and friendships to mitigate broadcast storm and hidden terminal problems. Furthermore, we employ the hybrid architecture of VSNs to solve connectivity and contact duration-related issues in sparse and high mobility environments. For this purpose, we devise a dual-strategy-based mechanism, where vehicles communicate with each other in a distributed or centralized manner according to the required situation. In order to evaluate the performance of proposed scheme, we have conducted extensive experiments for a highway scenario under varying vehicular density, vehicular speed and distance, in comparison with the state-of-the-art dissemination schemes. Simulation results have demonstrated the superiority of SUDS over the compared protocols in terms of delivery ratio, transmission delay and total number of transmissions. We have also demonstrated the positive effects of hybrid architecture of VSNs on various network parameters.

Data Transmissions Using Hub Nodes in Vehicular Social Networks

“…When vehicles with excess energy can be considered to be alternative charging points for other EVs that need to be recharged, an efficient social network among these vehicles would have a huge impact in terms of charging effectiveness [32]. In general, reducing end-to-end delay and achieving a higher delivery ratio is a challenge in VSNs [33], [34]. Appropriate mechanisms have to be conceived in order to deal with the intermittent connectivity.…”

Emergency warning messages dissemination in vehicular social networks: A trust based scheme

“…In [32], a game-theory based approach has been presented for data dissemination in VANETs to avoid broadcast storm problem. Very recently, in [12], the authors proposed an efficient dissemination scheme for EWMs based on a social utility measure by employing social groups, friendships, and interests of the users in VSNs. However, these schemes do not offer any protection from malicious nodes which may generate a false alarm with malign intent.…”

“…However, only the receiving vehicles that are nearest to the indicated anomaly location keep a suspicious EWM for further validation while others discard it. Being in line of sight of the anomaly location and closer to source vehicle, which can be calculated similar to [12], the receivers decide whether the emergency is real or not by observing the situation. If the generated EWM is found to be authentic, then the farthest vehicle from the anomaly location is selected as the broadcaster which further broadcasts it according to TDS protocol.…”

“…If they validate the EWM then the dissemination process is initiated. Similar to [12], we consider the infrastructure support vital for our dissemination strategy. In case if there is an RSU in the range then infrastructure based dissemination is employed because of the higher resource availability and efficacy.…”

“…Moreover, this information not only helps in developing efficient data forwarding and content dissemination but can also give an insight into anomalous behavior on the road [10,11]. In this context, few social utility based mechanisms have also been proposed recently for dissemination of EWMs in vehicular networks to mitigate the issues faced by conventional VANET based schemes such as [12] and [13].…”