Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

With the recent advances in wireless communication and mobile networking coupled with the growing interest of The Government of Canada to make our transportation system safer, more reliable, more efficient than ever, a new kind of vehicular ad hoc networking has emerged with a variety of ITS applications. We envision several applications for the next generation of VANets (NGVNs) that include: urban emergency responses, road safety and security, traffic monitoring, environment-aware, and driving comfort, just to mention a few. However, there are still several open issues that must be resolved before NGVNs are deployed and become a commodity. Secure and reliable service discovery, in particular, is one of the main issues that are delaying the widespread deployment of future application for NGVNs. Service discovery has been widely investigated and several techniques have been proposed for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) that, unfortunately, cannot be directly applied to VANets due to quick changes in link topology, high mobility pattern of vehicles and frequent disconnections among vehicles, especially in low density areas. In this NSERC SerVANet project, we primarily aim at the development of am efficient, scalable, low overhead, secure, and fault-tolerant service discovery infrastructure for NGVNs. To this end, we propose a novel class of service discovery techniques to overcome the challenging issues and critical requirements of NGVN based applications. The outcomes of this project are expected to have a profound impact on how Intelligent Transportation Systems are designed for public safety and security as well as infotainment class of applications. The proposed service discovery infrastructure will contribute to the development of Canada's key applications of vehicular networks and leverage local knowledge in this area of research. We and our Industry partners believe that this NSERC research proposal is timely and is in sync with the increasing demand for safety of Canadian roads and improving the quality of life for drivers and passengers.