Creative Testbeds for VANET Research: A New Methodology

The ever-increasing processing power that can today support large scale and detailed simulations increased the depth of the research carried out on protocols and apps developed for single hop and multi-hop Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) environments. It is now possible, for example, to verify the effectiveness of peer-to-peer one-hop file exchange protocols between vehicles, while taking into account the effects that buildings have on point-to-point transmissions at street intersections, or also verify how a high density of vehicles can impact the transfer of multimedia information through multiple hops between passengers involved into an online game. However, what has not been possible so far, for the obvious reason that no highly dense VANETs in reality exists, is to effectively test any type of application or communication protocol in a real setting, especially for the scenarios concerned with multi-hop communications. But this may change, with the introduction of a creative approach to VANET research: we will here describe how it is possible to experiment with applications and protocols in scenarios that are close to reality, by simply using a few real vehicle resources. As an example of how this can be done, we will provide preliminary results from a set of experiments on a vehicular highway accident warning system, results that would have not been observable in reality without the adoption of our creative methodology.