Link2speed: VANET speed assessment via link-state analysis

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging technology with a promising future and great challenges. It aims to promote safe driving, improve traffic flow and also enables a variety of entertainment applications. A fundamental need in such a network is the ability to assess vehicular speed. This enables the collection of statistics for the purpose of traffic engineering and long-term planning, and is also critical information for law enforcement groups. Many existing speed assessment technologies suffer from high physical visibility, and relatively expensive hardware. Even those that avoid detection, are inflexible due to being location specific. Therefore, reducing the ability to track and enforce traffic speed and limiting the collection of statistics for traffic engineering. In this paper, we propose a method for vehicle speed assessment, by extracting an induced Communication Connectivity Graph (CCG) from VANET optimized link state routing (OLSR) protocol, and composing an optimization problem for assessing the speed boundaries, using graph hop distance based constraints. We performed evaluation experiments in different traffic scenarios using traffic simulation tool. Our method can provide a cost-effective, easy to implement and hard to uncover solution for vehicles speed assessment on highways.