An EXperimental Hybrid wIrelesS platform for vehicular networks

The need to improve road traffic management is evident worldwide. Growing congestions on the roads along with a gradual increase of pollution and concern for improving traffic safety have prompted to explore the potential of the Intelligent Transportation Systems through numerous research projects funded by public entities and/or the automotive industry. However, due to various reasons, including the global economic crisis, such a goal has not been reached till now. Thus, the efforts now should be directed toward the development of low-cost solutions that help to fulfill the main objectives of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks to support safety and non-safety vehicular applications. This paper proposes the deployment of a Vehicular Ad-hoc Network based only on mobile devices for the communication between vehicles. This proposed scheme uses a hybrid architecture network that combines an online mode with an offline mode, depending on the existence of Internet access. The proposal described here has been developed for the Android platform and the obtained results are promising.