The Age and Updating Stability for a Communication Context in VANET

VANETs make it possible to execute specific vehicular applications, in particular those with the aim of turning traffic safe and avoiding congestion. However, it is difficult to maintain communication between vehicles when these vehicles move dynamically at high speeds. Context-aware systems have been studied as a way to monitor context information from sensors, which can be used by systems to adapt to changes in their environment or in application requirements. This concept is used by VANET protocols and applications in different ways. Quality of Context (QoC) metrics are used to qualify the context information considering different characteristics of sensors and of the information, being a base for systems to decide if it is safe and interesting to use specific information. In this paper, we propose QoC metrics related to the stability of the updating process for a vehicular communication context. In addition, we also analyze the Age QoC metric and show how to calculate it for distinct context information. We simulate scenarios to verify the QoC metrics behavior. The results showed that the proposed QoC metrics can properly qualify the vehicular communication context.