Today’s vehicles are equipped with a plurality of microprocessors and microcontrollers, in some models easily exceeding one hundred. Adding to this immense processing power, various sensing capabilities, unlimited battery lifetime, and large body for placement of multiple radars and sensors, makes our vehicles very powerful sensing and computing machines. From the three pillars of sensing, computing, and communication—for becoming a cognitive node— our vehicles are well equipped with the former two, but significantly deprived of the third pillar. Despite much progress in manufacturing sophisticated vehicles, the communication methods among drivers on reads are primitive, through visual contact and light signals, which quickly loses its effectiveness in high speeds and in non-line-of-sight. Car accidents and fatalities beget billion dollar losses annually. In police reports and on-scene investigations, human factors are found to be the definite cause for 70% of the crashes. Most of such accidents can be prevented if wireless communication and networking devices are installed in cars that allowed vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. But, what is the most appropriate communication technology that can be used in cars and also be attractive for future buyers?
The next generation of car buyers is the tweeter and facebook generation. For them, the most attractive feature is not the engine horsepower, rather the capability for onboard social networking and continuous connection to their buddies. Are our roads and vehicles ready for digital dashboards and social networks? What is the technology that can support such applications? Can LTE and Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) technologies coexist? These are some of the questions one might ask when building a cognitive car. In this tutorial, we will review the techniques and the challenges for cooperative communication in cognitive vehicular environment. We will discuss all layers in the communication stack including, applications, Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) short messaging, IEEE1609 and IEEE802.11p suite of standards, security, and resource management. We will also discuss research challenges in the communication and networking including congestion control, topology transparent scheduling, and the application of network coding in vehicular networks.
Dr. Shahrokh Valaee Biography:
Dr.Shahrokh Valaee holds the Nortel Institute junior chair of Computer Networks in the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, and from July 2011 he will be the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies. He is the founder and the Director of the Wireless and Internet Research Laboratory (WIRLab) at the University of Toronto. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Toronto, he was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University and with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Sharif University of Technology. Prof. Valaee was the Co-Chair for Wireless Communications Symposium of IEEE GLOBECOM 2006. He has served as a guest editor for several journals including IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, Wiley Journal on Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, and EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing. He is currently an Editor of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, and IEEE Signal Processing Letters. Prof. Valaee is the Technical Program Co-Chair of IEEE PIMRC 2011. His current research interests are in wireless vehicular and sensor networks, location estimation and cellular networks.
