An Overlay Approach for Optimising Small-World Properties in VANETs

International audienceAdvantages of bringing small-world properties in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) in terms of quality of service has been studied and outlined in the past years. In this work, we focus on the specific class of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and propose to un-partition such networks and improve their small-world properties. To this end, a subset of nodes, called injection points, is chosen to provide backend connectivity and compose a fully-connected overlay network. The optimisation problem we consider is to find the minimal set of injection points to constitute the overlay that will optimise the small-world properties of the resulting network, i.e., (1) maximising the clustering coefficient (CC) so that it approaches the CC of a corresponding regular graph and (2) minimising the difference between the average path length (APL) of the considered graph and the APL of corresponding random graphs. In order to face this new multi-objective optimisation problem, the NSGAII algorithm was used on realistic instances in the city-centre of Luxembourg. The accurate tradeoff solutions found by NSGAII (assuming global knowledge of the network) will permit to better know and understand the problem. This will later ease the design of decentralised solutions to be used in real environments, as well as their future validation