This research aims at using vehicular ad-hoc networks as infra-structure for an urban cyber-physical system in order to gather data about a city. In this scenario, all nodes are data sources and there is a gateway as ultimate destination for all packets. Because of the volatility of the network connections and uncertainty of actual node placement, we argue that a broadcast-based protocol is the most adequate solution, despite the high overhead.

The Urban Data Collector (UDC) protocol has been proposed which uses a distributed election of the forwarding node among the nodes receiving the packet: nodes that are nearer to the gateway have shorter timers and a higher forwarding probabilities. The performance of the UDC protocol has been evaluated with different suppression levels in terms of the amount of collected data from each road segment using NS-3, and our results show that UDC can achieve significantly higher sensing accuracy than to other broadcast-based protocols.