The working group on “Fundamentals: IVC and Computer Science” discussed the lasting value of achieved research results as well as potential future directions in the field of inter- vehicular communication. Two major themes ‘with variations’ were the dependence on a specific technology (particularly the focus on IEEE 802.11p in the last decade) and the struggling with bringing self-organizing networks to deployment/market.
The team started with a retrospective view and identified the following topics as major contributions in the last decade: analysis and design of single-hop broadcast communication and geonetworking, scalability issues (for both, small and large penetration rates) as well as corresponding security and privacy approaches. In addition, all the work also led to a strong requirements elicitation for the domains of safety and efficiency applications bringing together traffic experts, automotive engineers and the IVC community. The working group considered various contributions to have a lasting value, particularly analytical models for information dissemination, approaches to control or to avoid congestion of the radio channel, building control applications on top of the unreliable wireless communication as well as a bunch of security approaches like broadcast authentication and misbehavior detection. In addition, the working group tried to check whether results from the previous Dagstuhl seminar on Inter-Vehicular Communication in October 2010 has led to new research directions and results. In the 2010 seminar, the participants proposed to put more focus on the applications and the assessment of their benefits, first ignoring too many technical details and then adding technological constraints successively. Several research results appeared to have followed the proposed roadmap, see for example [1, 2, 3].
The working group then did a ‘gap analysis’, touching the following two issues: a) to what extend should IVC research ‘tailor’ a specific technology and b) should the interaction with other research communities be strengthened? The working group identified fault tolerance, reliable consensus and cognition as computer science fields that should be more involved in IVC research. In addition, the engineering and deployment issues appear to deserve more attention, thus, an easy answer on how much ‘tailoring’ and how much ‘general results’ are needed could not be given.
As a result of the discussions, the following research topics showed great promise to the working group members:
- Group communication, application protocols and reliable consensus. While in the last decade the focus was on one-hop broadcast messages, with coordinated maneuvering and automated driving a group of vehicles needs to communicate reliably, with a specified application protocol, to achieve reliable consensus. As vehicular traffic is full of protocols, it is no big wonder that maneuvering requires application protocols. However, group formation and dealing with the unreliable wireless channel brings interesting research questions in.
- Cognition and safety. The cooperation with experts from cognitive vehicles and from automotive safety should be strengthened since application requirements come from detecting dangerous traffic situations (including pedestrians and bicyclists) as well as of safe driving strategies.
- Self-organizing systems. The promise made by the IVC community to design self- organizing networks is not enough for deployment or market entry, as many field opera- tional tests clearly show: the radical new design of the network alone and the sheer scale of the system requires many innovations in the whole IT management chain. Here again, principles from self-organizing systems and the whole self-x movement might help while being complemented by existing IT management techniques.
- Flexible and adaptable communication architectures that can adjust to changing contexts, technologies and application mixes and that allows the system to evolve over time. This would also open a chance for building networks that go beyond IVC and would lead towards an Internet-of-Things approach.
With future cooperative automated vehicles, all the aspects mentioned above require and deserve further efforts in the field of inter-vehicular communication.