Editorial for Special Issue on “Advances on Vehicular Communication Systems”

Abstract

Editorial: The joint efforts of academia and industry in the past years have led to the introduction of new on board applications and services. In addition, governments and standardization organizations have agreed upon a common set of standards (DSRC) specific to vehicle-tovehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. Combined with the cellular network infrastructure, they pave the way for a plethora of solutions empowered by vehicular communications. Among these solutions, we have emergency alerts, autonomous vehicles, infotainment, comfort services, cooperative road sensing and collaborative applications. Also, the integration between smartphones and vehicles has been addressed by many researchers, and a wide range of applications are already available, many more being expected. In terms of communication systems, mobility effects and channel conditions heavily affect the signal quality, introducing path-loss, fading, and received power fluctuations. Under such conditions, several issues remain open including message dissemination in congested environments, Quality of Service (QoS), efficient and adaptive routing, MAC layer enhancements, mobility prediction, efficient handovers, etc. For this special issue we have selected 6 high-quality papers among a total of 26 submissions. The first article, entitled “Implementation and Performance Evaluation of Distributed Autonomous Multi-Hop Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications over TV White Space” by K. Tsukamoto et al., presents a two-layer control channel model able to establish the multi-hop network. In their proposal, the vehicles construct a swarm using location and direction information, while sharing route and channel information. The vehicles use GPS-driven oscillators for coarse synchronization, introducing a time margin to accommodate for the remaining drift. Simulation results show that the proposed idea is suitable for vehicular environments, providing efficient and stable V2V communication. The second article, entitled “Safety enhancement and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) reduction in VANETs” by A.F. Santamaria et al., discusses new approaches for road safety. In particular, the authors illustrate a novel cooperative architecture supporting both V2V and V2I connectivity. The idea, called SeAWave, takes advantage of the IEEE802.11p standard, enhancing it by adding useful messages to improve the vehicles’ active and passive safety systems based on information about the environment and road conditions. Simulations show good results for the proposed smart traffic management system. The third article, entitled “Target RSU Selection with Low Scanning Latency in WiMAX-enabled VANETs” by S.H. Ahmed et al., addresses the problem of handover management in VANETs, exploiting the potentialities of WiMAX services when users switch between C. T. Calafate (*) : P. Fazio Technical University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain e-mail: calafate@disca.upv.es