PASS: Parking-Lot-Assisted Carpool over Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Information interaction is a crucial part of modern transportation activities. In this paper, we propose the idea of PASS: a parking-lot-assisted carpool method over vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). PASS aims at optimizing transport utilization by the carpooling among car drivers who cover a part of the same traveling route. With wireless device enabled in the vehicle, a user can easily get matched vehicles information and then express his travel demands via radio queries over VANETs to the corresponding driver. The driver can decide whether to provide carpooling services or not. We investigate the main challenges in PASS design, via the parking lot to collect vehicle trajectories, via accelerator sensor to sense vehicle's movement, establish a routing tree to delivery vehicle trajectory information to nearby parking lots, and design a suitable matching scheme to match the target vehicle in VANETs. Finally, simulation results prove that PASS is effective and efficient in carpooling among vehicle drivers. © 2013 Jinqi Zhu et al.