Design and evaluation of a distributed consensus framework for safety related applications in vehicular ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs)

This thesis addresses coordination among vehicles in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). A generic distributed consensus framework that provides a consensus service which enables agreement tasks for all types of applications is developed. As part of the framework, the main building blocks of such services are defined: Group Communication Service, Consensus Service and Solution Notification Service. The framework is implemented on top of the standardized ETSI ITS protocol stack ITS-G5, GeoNetworking, and the Basic Transport Protocol. The well-known consensus algorithms Paxos/LastVoting (PLV) and One-Third-Rule (OTR) are integrated within the consensus service and enhanced for the designated VANET scenarios. An extensive simulation study shows promising results for an intersection coordination application.