REINVENT: Accessing vehicular networks in mobile applications

This paper proposes REINVENT, a software architectural solution to decouple the specificities of using vehicular network communication resources in Android smartphone applications. REINVENT provides a REST based message passing interface based on Android´s content provider to abstract vehicular network communication services. Using REINVENT, Android applications can use transparently the communication resources avoiding network transport layer details. REINVENT was tested in both laboratory and real world scenarios in the road with WAVE/IEEE 802.11p technology, to assess its usefulness in two Android applications, (VNChat and iThere). The real experiments also assess how REINVENT supports a mobile application to log relevant parameters in typical vehicular networks testing in different network scenarios.