A Framework for Efficient Communication in Hybrid Sensor and Vehicular Networks

Fast transmission of event-driven warning messages and energy conservation are primary concerns to design robust Hybrid Sensors and Vehicular Networks (HSVNs). In last few years, several protocols have been proposed to address these issues. However, the tradeoff between energy consumption and latency has not been carefully studied and sometimes it is given higher priority than event detection efficiency which remains the first objective of HSVNs. Unlike the existing works, we propose a framework that provides equilibrium between the following three metrics of HSVNs; dangerous events detection, energy consumption and transmission delay. The main advantage of our framework is its ability to ensure an effective detection of dangers on the road and timely transmission of the corresponding warning messages towards the passing by vehicles. This is achieved through the proposed mechanism to switch the sensors' status between sleep and active modes as well as the devised communication scheme between WSN-Gateway and the vehicles cluster head. The preliminary simulation results confirm the effectiveness of our framework and encourage us to pursue further investigation to extend it.