Emerging Vehicular Applications

Safe navigation support through wireless car-to-car and car-to-curb communications has become an important priority for car manufacturers as well as transportation authorities and communications standards organizations. New standards are emerging for car-to-car communications (DSRC and more recently IEEE 802.11p) [8]. There have been several well publicized testbeds aimed at demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of car-to-car communication safety; for instance, the ability to rapidly propagate accident reports to oncoming cars, the awareness of unsafe drivers in the proximity and the prevention of intersection crashes. While safe navigation has always been the prime motivation behind vehicle-tovehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications, vehicular networks provide a promising platform for a much broader range of large scale, highly mobile applications. Given the automobile’s role as a critical component in peoples’ lives, embedding software-based intelligence into cars has the potential to drastically improve the user’s quality of life. This, along with significant market demand for more reliability, safety and entertainment value in automobiles, has resulted in significant commercial development and support of vehicular networks and applications. These emerging applications span many fields, from office-on-wheels to entertainment, mobile Internet games, mobile shopping, crime investigation, civic defense, etc. Some of these applications are conventional “mobile internet access” applications, say, downloading files, reading e-mail while on the move, etc. Others involve the discovery