Vehicular networks for driver safety, by Raif Herrtwich, Daimler Chrysler. At Mobicom 2005, Cologne, Germany.

The presentation was certainly an eye-opener on the developments happening in this area. Surprisingly, a significant amount of progress has already been made towards deployment. The 802.11p working group is standardizing the PHY/MAC for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. The IEEE 1609.x group is working on application layer standardization. The FCC has allocated 75Mhz in the 5.9Ghz band for this as well.

Broadly, the ideas are that onboard equipment on vehicles will be equipped with GPS and tied in together with the safety belts, steering to prevent skidding, and warning alerts; cars will be able to warn each other and propagate warning back and forth. The onboard equipment will also be able to communicate with the roadside infrastructure that can conduct electronic payments, monitor traffic, send updates, and switch traffic signals. A large number of interesting use-cases were highlighted.

Keywords: DSRC, 802.11p, VII (Vehicle Infrastructure Integration), VANET (Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks)

Proposed research areas: (a) Security – Problem in security for adhoc networks is the absence of a third party certification agency, and hence identity becomes a problem. This is probably not true for VANETs because the onboard equipment can always be pre-provisioned with certified public keys. (b) Routing – Assume GPS availability, road mobility patterns. (c) Mobility models for road traffic in different parts of a city.

Questions: What seemed impractical was the initiative to create a completely separate infrastructure for driver safety, and to not use the existing cellular infrastructure. The cellular providers will definitely be interested in provided QoS guarantees for emergency traffic, and they are already thinking in terms of sensor networks from homes, cars, farms, everywhere, talking to the Internet core via the cellular networks.