Vehicular Networks for Combating a Worldwide Pandemic: Preventing the Spread of COVID-19

As a worldwide pandemic, the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) has caused serious restrictions in people's social life, along with the loss of lives, the collapse of economies and the disruption of humanitarian aids. Despite the advance of technological developments, we, as researchers, have witnessed that several issues need further investigation for a better response to a pandemic outbreak. With this motivation, researchers recently started developing ideas to stop or at least reduce the spread of the pandemic. While there have been some prior works on wireless networks for combating a pandemic scenario, vehicular networks and their potential bottlenecks have not yet been fully examined. This article provides an extensive discussion on vehicular networking for combating a pandemic. We provide the major applications of vehicular networking for combating COVID-19 in public transportation, in-vehicle diagnosis, border patrol and social distance monitoring. Next, we identify the unique characteristics of the collected data in terms of privacy, flexibility and coverage, then highlight corresponding future directions in privacy preservation, resource allocation, data caching and data routing. We believe that this work paves the way for the development of new products and algorithms that can facilitate the social life and help controlling the spread of the pandemic.Comment: 8pages5figure

Priority based Routing Protocol in Vehicular Ad hoc Network

Abstract — This paper presents a Priority based Routing Protocol (PRP) in Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET), according to message types. We focus mainly on a safety messaging application for safe driving in distributed environment, i.e., ad hoc manner. Broadcast based routing protocol is proposed along with priority and position enhancement to provide i) fully distributed routing protocol, ii) different quality of services (QoS) for different types of messages, iii) maximum message dissemination distance per hop. The proposed protocol, PRP, is evaluated using simulation software called OMNeT++. The performance parameters include average MAC delay, percentage of message reception and collision, as well as average message dissemination distance per hop. The results show the PRP achieves both message prioritization and maximum dissemination distance in fully distributed environment