FleaNet: A Virtual Market Place on Vehicular Networks

In recent years, mobile Internet devices such as laptops, PDAs, and smart phones have become extremely popular and widespread. When such devices are placed on board a vehicle, they could be made to automatically connect to the vehicle's processor, thus greatly increasing the communication and processing capabilities available to the owner in a "pedestrian mode." We envision that such a car communication system can be used as a distributed platform for "opportunistic cooperation" among people with shared interests or goals. The exchange of safety messages between vehicles is a compelling example of such cooperation among people. In this study, we extend this opportunistic cooperation beyond safety messages and discuss the concept of a virtual "flea market" over a Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) called FleaNet. In FleaNet, customers, either mobile (i.e., in vehicles) or stationary (e.g., roadside shop owners), express their demands/offers, e.g., their desire to buy or sell an item, via radio queries. These queries are opportunistically disseminated, by exploiting the mobility of other customers, in order to find a customer/vendor with matching needs/resources. In this study, we identify the key performance metrics, namely, query resolution latency, scalability, mobility, and churning. On the basis of these metrics, and using models and simulation, we show that FleaNet can function as an effective virtual marketplace over vehicular networks.