Bio-Communities Communications Paradigms for Vehicular Social Networks

A Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) provides digital data communication among vehicles through vehicle-to-vehicle communication and, between vehicles and Road-Side Units through vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. The research on large scale self-organised systems, as well as in social communities, pointed out the so called scale-free properties for typical VANETs, which implies a small-world network structure. The analogy between bacterial and VANETs life cycles is based on the fact that vehicles are usually aggregated in groups and, because of this, have the chance to cooperate and achieve a deeper insight into the surrounding context and to adapt their driving style accordingly. The chapter explores the most relevant bio-inspired routing and clustering approaches with a special focus on vehicular scenarios. The underlying concept of mobile group management is adopted to select the more suited schemes, among which are the ant or bee colonies organisation and the bacteria life cycle.