Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

The proposed project will investigate effective strategies to achieve reliable, efficient, and secure information dissemination in vehicle ad hoc networks for communications among vehicles and between vehicles and nearby roadside equipment. The proposed research addresses significant and technically challenging issues in time-sensitive dissemination of data to and from vehicles and in reliable and secure communications in the presence of high vehicular mobility, intermittent connectivity, and lossy channel. In particular, this project will develop (i) a distributed and dynamic node clustering algorithm, to establish a self-organized hierarchical network model to achieve network scalability and stability, (ii) a medium access control and packet scheduling scheme for timely information dissemination among vehicles in proximity, (iii) a distributed information packet routing scheme for efficient and reliable support of both unicast and multicast, and (iv) efficient message exchange mechanisms for secure communications with conditional privacy preservation. The project will help to push the frontier of terrestrial wireless communications to a new domain for both commercial and military applications. It will develop networking protocols and control algorithms critical for connecting mobile users ubiquitously, even in a highly dynamic network topology. The cutting-edge research will generate new ideas and knowledge in vehicular networking and, through collaborations with the industry sponsor, enable the development of new products which will foster a vital competitive edge for Canadian Information and Communication Technology industry in the international market place. The project will result in significant benefits to Canadian users in road safety, transportation efficiency, mobile Internet access, and many potential new on-road services and applications such as location aware information (map based directions) and content for entertainment (streaming movies, music, and advertisements).