System Support for Smart Cars: Requirements and Research Directions

With the introduction of Wireless Local Area Networking technology in recent years, many exciting applications are now closer to becoming a reality. One such application is the smart car or automated vehicle - a car capable of transporting its passenger(s) to their intended destination without human intervention. For this application, automated vehicles need to be able to co-ordinate with each other in a reliable and timely fashion. A logical approach to this problem would be to use existing real-time group communication techniques. However, existing techniques have been designed with a more static network in mind. In particular, group membership is more dynamic in the automated vehicle application. In this paper we outline new requirements for group communication suitable for such mobile applications. Such group communication must take into account the proximity of members of the group to each other. The Anois project, at Trinity College Dublin, is currently developing such a group communication system addressing these new requirements that arise due to mobility