Ascertaining viability of WiFi based vehicle-to-vehicle network for traffic information dissemination

Traffic congestion has become a part of daily life for most of us. One possible way of preventing congestion from building up is by disseminating traffic information. Today a number of commercial solutions exist for disseminating traffic information (e.g., Traffic.com, Metrocommute, Etak-Traffic). However, these solutions are plagued by prohibitive deployment and maintenance cost that prevents widespread deployment. As an alternative, solutions based on peer-to-peer architecture have been proposed. This results in a vehicular ad hoc network that is never connected because of the large geographical extent of atypical transportation network. In this paper, we examine the characteristics of such a network and whether it can support effective traffic information dissemination.