Vehicular Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks; Principles and Challenges

The rapid increase of vehicular traffic and congestion on the highways began hampering the safe and efficient movement of traffic. Consequently, year by year, we see the ascending rate of car accidents and casualties in most of the countries. Therefore, exploiting the new technologies, e.g. wireless sensor networks, is required as a solution of reduction of these saddening and reprehensible statistics. This has motivated us to propose a novel and comprehensive system to utilize Wireless Sensor Networks for vehicular networks. We coin the vehicular network employing wireless Sensor networks as Vehicular Ad Hoc and Sensor Network, or VASNET in short. The proposed VASNET is particularly for highway traffic .VASNET is a self-organizing Ad Hoc and sensor network comprised of a large number of sensor nodes. In VASNET there are two kinds of sensor nodes, some are embedded on the vehicles-vehicular nodes- and others are deployed in predetermined distances besides the highway road, known as Road Side Sensor nodes (RSS). The vehicular nodes are used to sense the velocity of the vehicle for instance. We can have some Base Stations (BS) such as Police Traffic Station, Firefighting Group and Rescue Team. The base stations may be stationary or mobile. VASNET provides capability of wireless communication between vehicular nodes and stationary nodes, to increase safety and comfort for vehicles on the highway roads. In this paper we explain main fundamentals and challenges of VASNET.