Vehicular Networks: A Survey on Architecture, Communication Technologies and Applications

The Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) provides wireless and mobile communication between vehicles and infrastructure to improve the safety of transportation and make the journey more enjoyable. This system consists of many fixed and mobile nodes (Vehicles, Trains, Vessels, Air planes), Wireless and Wired Telecommunication Technologies to exchange information between mobile nodes or between mobile nodes and fixed stations. The most common transportation tools are cars. Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks as an Application of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks and one of the subsets of Intelligent Transportation System provides wireless Ad-hoc communication between vehicles. VANET is a mobile wireless technology which is designed to improve safety of transportation with exchanging real time data between vehicles and providing different services to the users. It has special characteristics like high mobility and provides a broad range of services to the users, so it has been emerged as one of the research interests in the field of computer and telecommunication networks. In This paper we present different aspects of ITS and VANET to help the researchers to understand the Architecture, Communication Technologies and Applications of these networks.