NETCOM Research Group

Vehicular communications are a reality not too far to come. Driven by the goals of improving road safety and efficiency, governments, car manufacturers and telecommunication players are working towards the definition of a geonetworking-based architecture that enables vehicles to benefit from communication capabilities. The goal is to support different types of applications: critical safety (e.g., forward collision warning), non-critical safety (e.g., traffic efficiency applications), and non-safety (infotainment or generic Internet connectivity), but most efforts have been devoted so far to standardise critical safety applications, while ensuring coexistence with other types of applications. Bringing IP connectivity to cars will also enable classical and new Internet applications to be provided in cars.
This advance will also help speeding up the adoption of vehicular communication systems by the users, since they will see an additional benefit in the installation of a communication system in their cars. In order to help this become a reality, this project focuses on the design of Quality of Service enabled IP heterogeneous vehicular networks, where two fundamental needs are identified:

a. Integration of IP into a geonetworking-based vehicular architecture. This comprises the definition of IP autoconfiguration mechanisms, as well as protocols to transport IP datagrams inside vehicular networks.

b. Support of heterogeneous wireless technologies. This includes the design and evaluation of mechanisms that efficiently and transparently support mobility across different access technologies.

This mobility support will provide the IP services through the geonetworking based architecture wherever its coverage is available. If it is not, the mobility support will select the LTE network to handover the communication, since this is an emerging 4G technology with a promising broadband access.
Finally, an experimentation test-bed will be designed and deployed. This demonstrator will be used to validate and analyse the key mechanisms designed within each of the three areas above.
Additionally, a sub-set of mechanisms will be integrated, in order to gather some insight on the operation of the integrated architecture.