Cooperation in Autonomous Vehicular Networks

$EVWUDFW2 Vehicular networks are promising in providing Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication, thus allowing for several useful services on roads related to safety applications as well as entertainment applications. However, a number of constraints can impact the reliability of vehicular networks applications. The general constraints concern the high mobility, dynamic environment, security of communication, and routing scalability. On the other hand, cooperation is important and beneficial for services deployment in vehicular networks. We believe that cooperation in vehicular networks could be either implicit or explicit. The former concerns the efficiency of the MAC layer protocols in order to allow reliable multi-hop transfer between the nodes, and the efficient security mechanisms (mainly authentication and access control) that could allow the different vehicles (nodes) to communicate in a trusted manner and hence cooperate in relaying each others packets. While, the latter concerns the drivers’ (vehicles/nodes) behaviors, where vehicles should participate in the communication even without specific need for service access but for serving other vehicles that need relay nodes to be able to access services. In this harsh environment, innovative communication and cooperative techniques are needed. We believe that cooperative techniques can be beneficial in order to improve the performance of vehicular networks and to allow for reliable services access through those networks. In this chapter, we test this hypothesis and highlight some existing contributions in the field of cooperative autonomous vehicular networks.