Towards Characterizing and Classifying Communication-based Automotive Applications from a Wireless Networking Perspective

Together, the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) and Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) technologies provide a unique opportunity to develop various types of communication-based automotive applications. To date, many applications have been identified by the automotive society. Given the large number and diverse nature of these applications, it is advantageous to develop a systematic classification methodology to facilitate future DSRC and VANET research. Toward this objective, we present a study that goes through two major steps: characterization and classification. First, we focus on a rich set of representative applications and characterize them with respect to plausible applicationand networking-related attributes. The characterization process not only strengthens our understanding of the applications but also sets the stage for the classification step since it reveals numerous application commonalities. Thus, we have categorized the given applications into seven generic classes, with the consideration of balancing the trade-off between exploiting as many application similarities as possible while preserving their salient differences. This is of paramount importance to facilitate performance analysis for newly designed protocols. Finally, we have identified key performance metrics for each class of applications, which, we hope, could bridge the gap between the automotive and wireless networking communities. Accordingly, the proposed classes are envisioned to play a dual-role: to facilitate application simulation and performance evaluation, and to guide DSRC and VANET protocol research and development.