Data dissemination in VANETs and mobile sensor networks

Prof. Guohong Cao
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA

25 hours, 6 credits (final test)

June 9 - June 13, 2008

Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione: Elettronica, Informatica, Telecomunicazioni, via Diotisalvi, meeting room

Contacts: Prof. Giuseppe Anastasi

This activity is part of the Pisa International School on the Next Generation Internet.

Aims

This series of lessons will address both theoretical and technological aspects related to data dissemination in VANET and mobile sensor networks.

The first part will cover topics on data dissemination in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) and mobile sensor networks. VANET has been envisioned to be useful in road safety and many commercial applications. For example, a vehicular network can be used to alert drivers to potential traffic jams, providing increased convenience and efficiency. It can also be used to propagate emergency warning to drivers behind a vehicle (or incident) to avoid multi-car collisions. To realize this vision, FCC has allocated 75 MHz of spectrum for dedicated short range communications (vehicle-vehicle or vehicle-roadside), and IEEE is working on standard specifications for intervehicle communication. As more and more vehicles are equipped with communication capabilities that allow for intervehicle communication, large scale vehicular ad hoc networks are expected to be available in the near future.

The second part is on mobile sensor networks. Sensors are subject to power depletion, failures, malicious attacks, and may change their physical locations due to external force. These sensor failures may result in network partitions and then the sensing data cannot be disseminated to the sink. Further, distortion or occlusion in the physical sensing channel will be ultimately manifested as sensing uncertainty. Since the sensing channel depends on physical properties of the environment and sensor elements, then in general, only a physical reconfiguration can change this distortion or occlusion. Therefore, a fixed sensor network has limitations in gathering data and disseminating the data. Mobile sensors can be used to address these problems by reconfiguring the sensor network. Mobility can significantly increase the capability of the sensor network by making it resilient to failures, reactive to events, and be able to support disparate missions with a common set of sensors.

Syllabus

Data dissemination in VANETs

Mobile sensor networks