Tasks

TASK 1: GEO-OPTIMIZED VANET PROTOCOLS DRIVE-IN shall explore new ways of exploiting positioning and context information in the communications architecture, devising protocols capable of seizing the best transmission opportunities and disseminating vital information towards the right locations in the road network.

TASK 2: INTELLIGENT AND COLLABORATIVE CAR ROUNTING Relying on the VANET communication protocols developed in Task 1, DRIVE-IN shall contribute to the improvement of traffic flow by means of distributed and collaborative car routing algorithms. As opposed to the current state-of-the-art of centralized traffic information systems, our approach shall cope with massive numbers of users, defining socially optimal routes, i.e. those that maximize global benefit. We will thoroughly evaluate our project of collaborative car routing, resorting to large-scale experiments of three types: using the real VANET of 500 taxis; through our simulation platform, where we shall experiment 100% penetration ratio scenarios; and through a combination of simulated vehicles and vehicles driven by humans, where the eventual disregarding of suggested routes can be evaluated. TASK 3: VANET APPLICATIONS AND SERVICES Again based on the proposed VANET communication protocols, DRIVE-IN shall produce a variety of applications and services aimed at improving the user experience while in the car. The communication protocol with be mandated by diverse communication requirements of each application and service. As an example of inter-vehicular information dissemination, we shall implement V2V alerts based on the activation of safety systems of vehicles. We will also implement a message delivery service to specific vehicles based on the VANET, as well as services based on hybrid solutions (hotspots, 3G). DRIVE-IN research will enable multiplayer games over the VANET and we shall implement game prototypes on the network of taxis. This challenging type of application will provide a valuable testbed for the evaluation of QoS in VANET. TASK 4: HIGH PERFORMANCE VANET SIMULATION DRIVE-IN will extend our current VANET simulation platform and produce a valuable tool for research in vehicular networks, DIVERT 2.0, that will be crucial for our work throughout the project and that is used worldwide by different research groups. TASK 5: DEPLOYMENT AND EEXPERIMENTATION We will deploy the largest example of a real VANET, using 500 taxis in the city of Porto. Our deployment will be timed to give us two years of research based on this prototype network. The final year of the project shall already be able to measure the efficiency of our proposed solutions based on this network.