Clustered vehicular networks: decentralized detection "on the move"

In this paper, we analyze the performance of vehicular decentralized detection schemes, based on the observation, by all vehicles of a Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork (VANET), of a spatially constant phenomenon of interest. Our approach consists of the creation, during a downlink phase, of a clustered VANET topology during fast broadcast data dissemination, from the Access Point (AP), through a novel clustering protocol, denoted as Cluster-head Election Irresponsible Forwarding (CEIF). This clustered topology is then exploited, during an uplink phase, to collect information from the vehicles and perform distributed detection. Our results highlight the existing trade-off between decision delay and energy efficiency. Unlike classical sensor networks for distributed detection, the proposed vehicular distributed detection schemes exploit the natural vehicle clustering and have to cope with their “ephemeral” nature. More precisely, vehicle mobility has a direct impact on the maximum amount of data which can be collected, thus leading to the concept of decentralized detection “on the move”.