Quickly identifying the severity of highway acci-dents, as well as the resources required to assist the people involved in those accidents, is a basic requirement for future intelligent transportation systems. In this context, vehicular communication technologies currently being standardized are able to provide novel solutions to address this problem. In this work we study the feasibility of combining vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications to deliver a video stream from the place of the accident to the traffic authorities.
Our approach relies on vehicles as data relays, thus having the additional advantage of providing drivers with a clear view about the accident, thereby helping to reduce stress and improving traffic flow. An experimental analysis comparing different traffic flooding mechanisms for wireless networks show that the proposed system is viable for highways with moderate/high amounts of traffic, although highlighting the need for more efficient mechanisms specifically addressing broadcast propagation in highway envi-ronments.