Vehicular Network Applications and Services

Vehicular networks will not be commercially deployed unless there are applications that benefit from them. Since the first research projects on vehicular networks, see, for example, the PROMETHEUS project [1,2], the main focus has been on increasing traffic safety. With the help of vehicular communication, the number of accidents will decrease and human lives will be saved. Therefore, the two application categories that have attracted the most attention during the years are related to public safety, for example, collision avoidance applications and vehicular traffic coordination, where vehicles coordinate their movements with each other. Some considerable work has also been done on applications related to road traffic management, which can help alleviate congested roads and thereby decrease the number of accidents, as well as decreasing the travel time. Numerous other applications have also been proposed, which relate to other objectives than traffic safety. Many of these applications can be categorized as comfort applications. The objective of these applications is to improve the travel comfort for both the drivers (e.g., with information from roadside restaurants) and the passengers (e.g., with Internet access and video-on-demand systems). The main objective of the papers proposing various vehicular applications is usually to propose a data dissemination technique for this particular application. Very few papers, if any, have been focused on how the applications should be implemented in reality. In this chapter, we will, therefore, describe some proposed solutions for the envisioned applications and, thereby, also discuss suitable communication architectures and protocols for these applications