Collaborative Research: NeTS-NBD: Exploring the design and implementation of vehicular networked systems

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 first objective is to design and implement a flexible and efficient vehicular computing platform, bottom-up, starting from a car PC assembled in the lab, up to services and applications. This platform is a stepping stone toward defining a network architecture and protocol stack specific to vehicular networks.

This research can have a major impact on traffic safety. Not only it can reduce the accidents' cost in human lives, but also can significantly decrease the financial costs associated with these accidents. Furthermore, it can reduce fuel consumption and pollution by providing real-time traffic information to help drivers make better route planning decisions.

The main expected results are a vehicular network protocol stack and a prototype vehicular computing platform. The protocol stack consists of several new, vehicle-specific layers such as (i) Data Validation and Caching, (ii) Store and Forward Message Routing, (iii) In-Network Processing, and (iv) Application Layer supporting mobile queries. This research also develops a location-aware publish-subscribe framework that uses GPRS/3G links to efficiently route high-priority messages between disconnected IEEE 802.11-based ad hoc networks. Finally, it produces a new study of traffic modeling and an evaluation methodology for vehicular networking systems. Research labs of major car manufacturers will be contacted to establish collaborations and perform technology transfer.