Vehicular Sensor Networks: Technical Challenges, Supports, and Application Experiences

Dear Colleagues,

The development of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) based Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are interesting and active research areas nowadays, which is attracting significant efforts from both industry and academia, not only from the automotive and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) communities, but also from the fields of wireless and mobile sensor networks, smart environments, and mobile collaborative applications in general. In this context, many currently ongoing national and international collaboration projects practically demonstrate the relevant interest from government, industry, and academia in the field.

In particular, Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSNs) are becoming increasingly interesting and popular due to recent advances in inter-vehicular communication technologies and the decreasing cost of communication devices. Different from traditional wireless sensor nodes, vehicles are not typically affected by energy constraints and can easily be equipped with powerful processing units, wireless communication devices, GPS, and sensing devices, such as chemical detectors, still/video cameras, and vibration and acoustic sensors. Thus, they enable new and promising sensing applications, such as traffic reporting, relief to environmental monitoring, distributed surveillance, to mention a few promising (though not the most visionary) service provisioning scenarios.

The design, implementation, and deployment of dynamic, opportunistic, collaborative, scalable, efficient, reliable, robust, and secured mobile sensing applications for VSNs, especially over realistic and large-scale deployment environments, such as municipalities, present extraordinary challenges to the pervasive and mobile computing research community.

This Special Issue intends to disseminate the latest research results in this emergent research area, by providing a fresh snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in VANETs, VSNs, and mobile sensing. To this purpose, we are seeking high-quality papers reporting original research results and practical experiences of system design/prototyping/deployment related to topics that include, but are not limited to:

• Original algorithms and protocols for VSN mobile sensing
• Original middleware and platforms for the support of VSN applications
• Case studies of mobile sensing applications over wide-scale urban environments
• Vehicle-oriented crowdsensing and opportunistic participation
• Vehicle-oriented mobile cloud computing and edge computing
• Vehicular network architectures and protocols for mobile sensing
• Intra-vehicular sensor network and integration with (possibly legacy) embedded systems
• Routing, addressing, and transport-layer issues for mobile sensing
• Efficient QoS support for quality-sensitive mobile sensing applications
• Delay-tolerant and real-time supports for VSN mobile sensing
• Data dissemination solutions for VSN mobile sensing applications
• Performance, scalability, reliability, and efficiency of VSN supports and applications
• Safety, enhanced navigation, and car alert supports/services
• Vehicular collision avoidance using distributed sensing technologies
• Human-machine interface for VSN mobile sensing applications
• Mobility models and vehicle traffic models
• Simulation aspects of V2V, V2I, and VSNs
• Emulation and testbeds for large-scale VSNs
• Practical experience with standards (802.11p, CALM, P1609, etc.), standard development and evolution
• Security, encryption, and privacy for VSNs

Dr. Paolo Bellavista
Guest Editor

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