Inter-vehicles Communication: A New Frontier of Ad Hoc Networking

Summary form only given. The constant increase in the number of cars on the roads calls for effective means to improve road safety, transport efficiency, and passengers´ comfort. To this end, the research community, the industries and the governments all over the world are investing much of their efforts and money in the development of integrated intelligent transportation systems (ITS) based on wireless communication networks. Several national/international projects have been recently launched around the world: DSRC, VSC, VII in USA, C2CCC in Europe, AVS in Japan and Network on Wheels in Germany, to name a few. The road safety paradigm is moving from a passive one (air bags, ESP, etc.) to an active one, where sensors, radars, cameras, navigation systems, and microprocessors, commonly installed in vehicles, are integrated with wireless communication systems to support applications such as parking-assistance, lane- keeping, adaptive cruise-control, and many others. Vehicular Ad hoc networks (VANETs) can efficiently warn and inform drivers via direct wireless vehicle to vehicle communications, eventually reducing reaction time and information availability limitation. The creation of high-performance, highly reliable, highly scalable, and secure vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) poses extraordinary challenges related to the channel access, the routing information, the control of highly variable network topologies, the design of flexible middleware solutions to effectively support the application layer. In this context, the talk will highlight the current state of the art of VANETs over-viewing ongoing projects and standardization efforts. Moreover, we will also point out open issues on the design of communication protocols for VANETs, discuss on the directions for further research in this field.