Vehicular communication and sensor networks

Ubiquitous and pervasive communication services have rapidly gained popularity over the last few years. The main objective of these services is to allow information exchange in all environments. While this information exchange conventionally takes place between hand-held devices carried by the end users, a similar information exchange between vehicles is being envisaged. Vehicular communication is becoming increasingly popular in both the research and development arenas due to its far-reaching benefits. In a nutshell, it is concerned with giving vehicles the ability to detect and convey information regarding different traffic incidents. Vehicles can send information messages either to other vehicles within close range or to the roadside base stations (BSs). This idea is not entirely new because it previously existed in the form of ?telematics.? Telematics deals with the use of telecommunications for the information exchange between remote objects. The term became known in the late 1970s but did not gain popularity because the enoromous size of communication devices was a serious limitation to their widespread use. However, with the recent developments in chip design and integrated systems, housing low-power, small-sized devices inside vehicles has become possible. Vehicular communication has now become a distinct possibility and is being looked at from research and development perspectives.