A. CASTEIGTS, A. NAYAK AND I. STOJMENOVIC
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2
3
Fig. 1. A typical collision scenario leading to various reac-
tions: (1) fast forward of instant warnings to arriving cars to
avoid rear-end collisions, (2) infrastructure assisted warning
delivery toward incoming traffic to make it slowing down
ahead of time, and (3) notification to allow vehicles to take
an alternative route.
drivers, reducing fuel consumption and greenhouse gas
emissions, controlling the flow of vehicles based on
real-time traffic monitoring and congestion detection,
dynamically adapting signal light schedules to the
traffic conditions, and so forth. The main advantage
of using ad hoc communications between vehicles
is the easy and low-cost deployment this solution
offers, compared to the prohibitive installation and
maintenance cost of a full coverage infrastructure.
On the other hand, this also comes with a number
of challenging problems for both networking and
transportation research communities.
The basic requirement of such systems is a strong
set of standards allowing all vehicles to communicate
with each other regardless of their brands and models.
Standardization bodies, car manufacturers, public
sector players and academics have thus conducted
much effort ahead of this standardization, including
GM-CMU [1], MIT CarTel [2], or Berkeley PATH [3]
in the United States. Other examples include European
initiatives like Network-On-Wheels [4] or PReVENT
[5], whose results are now being integrated by the Car
2 Car Communication Consortium [6], and Asian ones
such as the Toyota InfoTechnology Center [7] and the
Vehicle Information and Communication System [8]
in Japan, or the large-scale traffic sensing that were
performed in China (more than 4000 GPS-enabled
taxis tracked in Shanghai to study the so-generated
network, SUVnet [9]). The first set of standards
concerning the access layers (PHY & MAC) are now
released and being implemented. Upper layers, such as
network and transport layers, are still under discussion
and open to new research contributions.
The design of reliable and adaptive protocols in
vehicular context is challenging, especially due to the
high dynamicity of the underlying topology and its
intermittent connectivity in most scenarios. Yet, the
movement of cars is constrained by the road structure
and this fact can be exploited to improve networking
tasks. It is also expected that a partial infrastructure
is still to be available at some strategic places (e.g.,
at intersections inside cities) to improve the connec-
tivity and provide dedicated services to drivers and
passengers. Besides safety and efficiency applications,
enabling value-added business applications is certainly
one of the most determining factor for a quick and
successful adoption of these technologies, which is
in turn crucial for safety and efficiency applications
that require a significant penetration rate to function
properly and bring benefits to drivers.
This tutorial is organized as follows. The next section
extends the introduction by presenting an overview of
the ITS architecture and briefly presenting the family of
standards and technologies that were chosen for access
layers (e.g., DSRC and WAVE). Section 3 discusses
the main applications one may expect from these
networks, classified as traffic safety, traffic efficiency,
and value-added applications. In Section 4, we present
the variety of models and parameters that can be used
to represent physical roads and vehicular traffic. The
choice for a proper model is of paramount importance
because protocols can hardly be tested in real contexts,
and their evaluation thus rely mainly on simulations.
The two last sections are dedicated to communication
protocols, and more particularly to broadcasting and
geocasting protocols (Section 5) and routing protocols
(Section 6). The emphasis is set on protocols that con-
sider realistic aspects of vehicular networks, such as
their intermittent connectivity. Some important topics
like security (encryption, channel abuse, privacy) are
not discussed in this tutorial. We refer the reader to [10]
for a survey on security issues, and to [11] for a com-
prehensive overview of other related topics including
traffic engineering and human factors studies.
2. Architecture Overview
The whole system is generally seen as the integration
of four classes of components [12]: vehicles, personal
devices, road-side equipment, and central equipment.
Road-side equipments (or RSUs for Road-Side Units)
are physical devices deployed along the road to
perform local tasks related to the traffic. They can be
for example traditional devices like traffic lights or
variable message signs enhanced with computational
and wireless communication capabilities, or dedicated
devices such as curve warning emitter or multi-hop
relays
(that aims at increasing the connectivity between
vehicles). These units can stand alone or be connected
with each other through a private network. They can
also be connected to the Internet and linked to central
servers. However, due to high cost of their deployment,
Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput. (2009)
DOI: 10.1002/wcm