Place Identification in Location Based Urban VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks, as a special case of delay tolerant networks, have become increasingly attractive to academia and industry. Different from most of the work in this field, which has focused on short periods of transient opportunistic contacts, in our previous work, we have analyzed the position data of a large set of urban private vehicles in Changsha, China and proposed a Location based Urban Vehicular network (LUV) utilizing the stable connections among vehicles. Place serves as a central message exchange and routing component in LUV that is critical in providing relatively reliable network connections. In this paper, we present a simple threshold based approach for identifying the places or vehicle aggregation areas, in an urban environment. We perform experimental study over a real set of data gathered over three months for 8900 vehicles and show the method is effective.