Vehicular ad-hoc networks: from vision to reality and back

VANETs, or vehicular ad-hoc networks, have recently gained scientific and commercial interest. In fact, they have drawn many people from neighboring fields like general mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), into their wake. In this invited paper, we discuss the history of vehicular ad-hoc networks from our perspective. In detail, we will show the early vision of creating a huge MANET that would facilitate cheap and ubiquitous communication on the ISM bands, and how this vision was reduced to cars sending emergency information in a geographically limited area. Also, we will describe how new challenges emerge from these new constraints, and then argue that VANETs are still an interesting research area