VESPA
(Vehicular
Event Sharing with a mobile P2P Architecture) is a system designed for
vehicles to share information in inter-vehicle ad-hoc networks. The
originality of VESPA
is to support any type of event (e.g., available
parking spaces, accidents, emergency braking, obstacles in the road,
real-time traffic information, information relative to the
coordination of vehicles in emergency situations, etc.) in the network.
VESPA is complementary to existing navigation systems.
Indeed, whereas
navigation systems can be used to guide drivers, VESPA may provide them
information about the road hazards they may encounter. It can also help
them to find an available parking space
once they have reached their destination.
VESPA relies on
the
computation of an Encounter Probability (EP) to
determine whether a vehicle is expected to meet an event or
not. Then, according to that encounter
probability, the
system decides if the driver has to be warned. The Encounter
Probability is
also used in VESPA to perform an efficient dissemination of
information between vehicles when they encounter each other.The
use of the Encounter Probability allows to adapt the dissemination
protocol to the type of information diffused in the network (vehicles
behind, all the vehicles located inside a determined geographical area,
etc.). VESPA does not rely on mobile telephony networks (e.g., 3G) but
rather uses short range communications (e.g., ad hoc Wi-fi exchanges).