This research is exploring inter-vehicular networking from a systems perspective. The vision is an intelligent transportation system composed of smart vehicles exchanging data for safe driving, traffic condition monitoring, emergency message dissemination, and dynamic route planning over hybrid wireless networks. The main objective of this project is to design and implement a flexible and efficient vehicular computing platform, bottom-up, starting from a car PC, up to services and applications.
This project combines research with engineering to produce vehicular software that can accelerate the transition from passive to active accident avoidance, with major impact on traffic safety. To bridge the gap between research studies and real-life applications, the focus of this project is on prototyping, along with testing and evaluation on real road conditions. To maximize the impact of this research and allow technology transfers, continuous contacts with research labs of major car manufacturers are established.
This project will produce a vehicular network protocol stack, consisting of four vehicle-specific layers: (i) Data Validation and Caching, (ii) Store and Forward Message Routing, (iii) In-Network Processing, and (iv) Application Layer with support for publish-subscribe and mobile queries. This network stack will be prototyped on a vehicular computing platform, consisting of a car-PC, GPS receiver, IEEE 802.11 or DSRC, and GPRS/3G communication links, which will be assembled in the lab. Several traffic querying service applications will be developed and evaluated over this platform. This research will also develop a study of traffic modeling and an evaluation methodology for vehicular networking systems.
