A Data Management Perspective on Vehicular Networks

The interest of intelligent transportation systems and vehicular ad hoc networks has increased in recent years. As a fundamental building block for the development of applications for vehicular networks, new techniques are needed to handle data appropriately in the vehicles. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of data management for vehicular networks, where the vehicle-to-vehicle communications play a key role. We describe the technological context of vehicular networks along with the different types of data managed in that environment, and we analyze several challenges, such as the evaluation of the relevance of data regarding the occurrence of events on the roads (e.g., accidents), the design of appropriate (effective and efficient) content-based data dissemination protocols, the competition in the access to physical resources (e.g., parking spaces), the development of suitable data aggregation techniques specifically adapted to the context of vehicular networks, and query processing. This paper provides an in-depth coverage of data management for vehicular networks but keeps, at the same time, a didactic orientation. Supported by an extensive collection of relevant references, we analyze the state of the art, identify some must-read references, outline research problems, and extract conclusions and lessons learned.