Abstract
In recent years, vehicles are becoming safer and more driver-friendly thanks to the advancements in sensing technology and wireless communications. Vehicular sensor networks and vehicular ad hoc networks (VeSANs) play a critical role to ensure prompt delivery of real-time sensing data for processing. Within a vehicle, various types of on-board sensors produce significant amount of real-time sensing data, and these data require an efficient and robust vehicular sensor network to transport. Communications also exist among vehicles. Some sensing data such as speed may be exchanged among vehicles to produce timely and meaningful traffic information. Vehicles may also communicate with other roadside infrastructures such as parking and shopping facilities to obtain relevant information. A practical and robust design of VeSANs is essential to facilitate these emerging vehicular social applications. To accelerate the adoption of these new emerging techniques, a number of important issues must be addressed such as the routing and security of VeSANs and applications. In this special issue on vehicular networking, we have invited a few papers that address such issues.
Several papers proposed some methods to deal with abnormal traffic events or misbehaving vehicles in the network. The paper titled as “A survey of abnormal traffic information detection and transmission mechanisms in VSNs” gives out a survey of the abnormal traffic information detection and transmission mechanisms in VSNs. The paper titled as “Applying information hiding in VANETs to covertly report misbehaving vehicles” addresses vehicle reporting problems based on two information hiding techniques—subliminal channels and steganography. The paper titled as “Social contribution-based routing protocol for vehicular network with selfish nodes” designs a social contribution-based routing protocol for selfish vehicular network. When making forwarding decision, the proposed routing protocol considers both the delivery probability to the destination and the social contributions of the relay node. The paper tilted as “Social group architecture based distributed ride-sharing service in VANET” gives out a distributed ride-sharing service based on dual social group architecture. The service is divided into driver social group architecture message and vehicle social group architecture message, and vehicles generate dual SGA messages to complete ride-sharing service.
Several other papers address security problems in the network. The paper titled as “Location-based distributed group key agreement scheme for vehicular ad hoc network” adopts a new location-based distributed group key agreement scheme for VANETs. Members in the vehicular ad hoc network form various logic groups in the same region, and within each group, virtual key tree model is employed so that the rekeying operation can be efficiently carried out when members leave or join. The paper titled as “The optimal noise distribution for privacy preserving in mobile aggregation applications” develops a mathematical framework to derive the optimal noise distribution that provides privacy protection under the constraint of a limited value deviation. The paper titled as “A novel authentication scheme for V2I communication based on WAVE unicast services” presents a novel authentication and privacy scheme based on WAVE unicast services to reduce the PKI overhead between vehicles and roadside units.
The remaining several papers address some issues for applications and platforms of the network. The paper titled as “A multihoming clustering algorithm for vehicular ad hoc networks” proposes a new clustering metric and a clustering algorithm with multihoming support. It relies only on the vehicle's ability to send and receive wireless packets which identify the vehicle relationship. The paper titled as “Cooperative downloading by multivehicles in urban VANET” uses roadside units and vehicles to download big files cooperatively in blind zones. The paper titled as “On application-customized common platform for wireless vehicular sensor networks” sets up an application-customized common platform for wireless vehicular sensor networks. It provides a friendly web-based user interface, so that deploying or reprogramming a running field application in the network becomes very convenient. The paper titled as “PSFCS: Robust emergency communications supporting high-mobility based on WiMAX MMR networks” proposes an enhanced CRC-based error correction scheme that carries as many extra segmented frame check sequence (FCS) information as subblocks of emergency multicast/broadcast service frame.