A P2P Network of Space Containers for Efficient Management of Spatial-Temporal Data in Intelligent Transportation Scenarios

The effectiveness of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) depends on their ability to collect contextual data from various sources and appropriately generate and transport comprehensible, reliable and timely content to users. In such applications, the exchanged content is structured in space and time. Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are the natural choice these applications due to their fault-tolerance, self-organization and scalability properties. However, a closer analysis of the available Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) protocols shows that the structure of the data gets lost and its short liveness leads to high signalling traffic. In this work we propose a novel overlay network of so called Space Containers for storing, accessing, manipulating and structuring dynamic geo-located content. The benefits of combining Space Containers and DHT are: clean applica-tion programming logic and efficient content retrieval while preserving the properties of DHTs. We describe the system architecture applied to a trans-portation scenario and show preliminary evaluation results. 1