A Survey on VANETs Applications and Its Challenges

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is an ad hoc network in which vehicles acts as nodes. It is an application of MANET. VANET is becoming an active area of research because it has tremendous potential to improve safety of vehicles and traffic efficiency. We use the VANET instead of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) due to high mobility of the vehicles as MANET does not support high mobility. Wireless Vehicular ad hoc network technology is designed for allowing wireless communication between vehicles on the road, enabling the transfer of information to ensure driving safety and traffic management with internet access to drivers and programmers. VANET applications include traffic optimization, payment services, location-based services and infotainment. Providing security in VANET is a challenging due to its characteristics like network topology changes, high mobility, scalability, limited bandwidth, frequent exchange of information, wireless communication, absence of infrastructure, battery power and storage capacity. Because of the road safety functions there is a strong demand for security in VANETs as human lives can be affected directly or indirectly by a single wrong message. In this paper, we are going to survey different applications and challenges of VANETs.