Method and system for operating a vehicular data network based on a layer-2 periodic frame broadcast, in particular a routing protocol

Abstract

Method for operating a network node of a wireless digital data network based on broadcast layer-2 periodic frames, wherein said network is composed by a plurality of network nodes, wherein each network node is either a mobile node equipped with an on-board unit (OBU) node, or is a static node equipped with a road-side unit (RSU) node, said method comprising a current network node of the plurality of network nodes carrying out the following steps: periodically broadcasting a Network Status Information (NSI) frame which comprises: the node identifier and a type of node of the current network node; receiving broadcasted NSI frames from neighboring network nodes of the plurality of network nodes reachable by the current network node through wireless communication; for any one received NSI frame, storing the received NSI frame in an entry in a NSI table (NSIT) if the received NSI frame was the first received NSI frame from a neighboring network node, or otherwise, if the received NSI frame was not the first received NSI frame from the neighboring network node, updating a previously stored NSIT entry with the received NSI frame; marking as expired or deleting any previously entered NSIT entry after a predetermined period of time has passed after receiving or updating said any previously entered NSIT entry. Also an electronic network node of a wireless digital data network, wherein said network node is programmed to carry out the method.