The basic building block in making vehicle communication possible is through VANET which enables various features to support various applications. To facilitate VANET in computing and storage, Cloud computing plays an important role. Detail description of VANET and cloud is mentioned below.
Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network
Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a kind of Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) which consists of vehicles like the mobile nodes and Road Side Units (RSU). The key features of Vehicular Ad-hoc Network that differentiate it from MANET are highly mobile nodes, boundless network size, Time Critical, recurrent exchange of information, Wireless Communication and frequent topology changes. VANET is a self-governing as well as a self-organizing wireless communication network, wherein the nodes of VANET entail themselves as clients or servers for exchanging & sharing information. A smart vehicle for computation and communication,(Nguyen et al. 2018) can be equipped with some of the following types of equipment internally and externally like: On-board device, GPS device, wireless transceiver, camera, sensors, RADAR, LIDAR, I/O interfaces. (Raza et al. 2019)
For achieving VANET Communication information can be exchanged using Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications. This communication is achieved through OBU and using DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communication) signals within an area of around 1 km forming an Ad-hoc communication which provides the feature that connected vehicles can move freely, they don't need any wires. (Shrestha et al., 2018)
Safety applications are concerned with the safety of the drivers and passengers while traveling to make it safe and include sending timely warning messages just to assist the driver to take proper actions to avoid accidental situations. Safety messages also include details about traffic jams, road construction, and diversions, accident reports, etc. The need for safety applications is low latency and high reliability. (Zekri & Jia, 2018)
Non-safety applications offer a comfortable and efficient driving experience. It is further categorized into two sets: traffic management and infotainment. Traffic management is related to improving the flow of traffic on the road and to avoid obstruction so as to save the time of all the passengers. Infotainment is for entertainment purpose i.e to provide internet access to the passengers so as to facilitate video calling, video streaming, data storage, etc. These kinds of applications are not latency-sensitive.
Although researchers have already deployed some route planning and surveillance still many issues exist in VANET systems. The reason behind that is technical hitches in both exploitation and supervision. Few issues still look to be impenetrable in the present design like a great increase in the number of interconnected devices, competent resources exploitation, uneven traffic flow, geographical addressing, delay restriction because of high mobility and unpredictable connectivity between devices; and Quality of Service (QoS)(Truong et al., 2015)
Simulation tools like NS-2, SUMO, and GlomoSIM, etc. can be used for VANET implementation and to simulate the performance of the proposed system.