Keynote Address 2

Summary form only given. The significant advances in hardware manufacturing technology and the advent of the Micro-Electro-MechanicalSwitches (MEMS) paved the way for building smart sensor nodes that are capable of performing three important functions: sensing, processing, and wireless communication. These wireless sensor nodes are characterized by being intelligent, small-sized, low in cost, battery-driven, and easy to install and repair. These characteristics opened wide doors for a broad range of applications attained by deploying wireless sensor nodes in a dense, distributed manner to form specialized Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The main objective of WSNs is to monitor physical or environmental phenomena like temperature, sound, vibration, relative humidity, pollutants, etc. They also collect data to be reported to a central processing unit that analyses the gathered data and take certain measures accordingly. An interesting field where the use of WSNs proves effectiveness is the field of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). An Intelligent Transport System uses technological advances in computers and information technology to improve the efficiency of both new and existing vehicular systems. By providing surveillance and tracking services, traffic conditions, in both urban and rural areas, can be monitored continuously. There have been extensive proposals in the literature to support vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications that benefit from the characteristics of WSNs. These proposals employ different WSN architectures to serve different objectives and applications. In this paper, these architectures were reviewed and highlight their strengths and weaknesses.