Vehicular Mobile Commerce: Applications, Challenges, and Research Problems

With an increasing number of vehicles with significant computing and communication, many applications such as vehicular Internet hot-spots, digital and entertainment content’s broadcast, Intelligent Transportation Systems applications, and highway management will become possible. This “vehicular mobile commerce” will actively involve vehicles and users in both extending the existing mobile commerce applications to the vehicular environment and creating many more new and suitable applications. Before vehicular mobile commerce becomes a practical reality, many technical, structural and user issues must be addressed. In this paper, we identify and discuss several vehicular mobile commerce applications as well as wireless and networking challenges. We present possible solutions for vehicular mobile commerce and define several research problems that should be undertaken.