C-VeT, the UCLA Vehicular Testbed: An Open Platform for Vehicular Networking and Urban Sensing

In the last few years Wireless Vehicular networks have been in the limelight for their potential in many human applications such Road Safety, Info-Mobility, Infotainment, Environmental Monitoring, etc. The research community responded to the new emerging needs designing a number of applications, algorithms, and protocols to cope with the vehicular environment. Differently from tactical ad hoc networks, vehicular networks present several new challenges including: high-speed mobility of the nodes, (resulting in a relatively short contact time), constrained mobility models, harsh propagation environment, high radio interference, and frequent network disruption in urban sparse traffic. Hence, a totally new network paradigm is needed. In this position paper we argue Vehicular Testbeds as the ideal playground to study the behavior of a new class of vehicular applications and protocols in an highly realistic environment; yet maintaining control on the experimental scenarios and the ability to perform large scale experiments through the integration of testbeds and simulation tools.