Cooperative context data acquisition and dissemination for situation identification in vehicular communication networks

One of the most interesting recent topics in pervasive computing is the smart adaptive service support systems. These systems are impossible without knowing the context with the entity at the moment, what context was in the past and what is possible in the near future. The context alone is not so important in human oriented services provided in connected vehicles. In this environment we need to know not only the exact context but also the higher level information—situation. The situation awareness can be increased by exchanging it to other participating nodes—vehicles. Because the vehicular communication network is a very dynamic environment, it is essential to adequately respond to the user’s needs and to provide all the needed services in the right place at the right moment and in the right way. In this work we present our developed cooperative context data acquisition and dissemination model for situation identification in vehicular communication networks. Our solution is different from others as it uses additional virtual context information source—information from other vehicles is weighted and exchanged using the utility function. The proposed decision support system decides if the message should be transmitted to other vehicles, sent to the cloud, saved locally or dismissed. The simulation results show the promising context exchange rate between vehicles and huge saving on channel utilization.