Vehicular Communication Network Environments: Challenges, Issues and Applications

Modern society is facing serious problems with the transportation systems given the increase in traffic jams, accidents, fatalities and CO2 emissions. Thus, improving the safety and efficiency of transportation systems is imperative. Developing a sustainable transportation system requires a better usage of the existing infrastructure, the adoption of emerging technologies (e.g. embedded devices, sensors and short-range radio transmitters) and the development of applications capable of operating in wireless and spontaneous networks. In this paper, the authors give readers a global vision of the challenges and issues related to the development of applications for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET). It also presents a classification of applications and an overview of the top-level application domain. In addition, it investigates the importance of information in vehicular networks and analyses the requirements for different types of vehicular applications placing them in a table which summarized the findings. Finally, the communication schemes that underpin the operation of VANET applications as well as the security threats they are exposed to are studied.