Link: Turning cars into wireless network nodes.
You can see above how vehicular sensor networks (VSNs) can be built on top of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) by equipping vehicles with onboard sensing devices. (Credit: Network Research Lab at UCLA) You'll find more details by looking at the MobEyes research project home page. This is one of the projects handled by the Network Research Lab at UCLA Computer Science Department, where computer science professor Mario Gerla and researcher Giovanni Pau are trying to turn your cars into wireless networking nodes.
As Gerla said, "We have all of these computer devices as integrated systems inside our cars. It's time to extend that concept. Computers are already being installed in many vehicles, and wireless capability will soon follow, so a mobile network deployment would only require the relatively low-cost addition of sensors to the vehicle's roof and bumpers and configuring the computer with new 'mobile' applications."
Pau added that the UCLA's team was using existing technologies. "We use standard radio protocols such as Digital Short Range Communication, or DSRC, combined with wireless LAN technology to create networks between vehicles equipped with onboard sensing devices. These devices can gather safety-related information, as well as other complex multimedia data, such as video. The most essential aspect of this network is that it is not subject to memory, processing, storage and energy limitations like traditional sensor networks. It relies on the resources of the vehicle itself, along with those vehicles around it."
Turning a car into a wireless network node might be easy to do, but what would be the benefits? According to the researchers, they are broad. Here are some of them.
Day-to-day driving could be safer and more convenient;
Drivers would have access to information about dangers within or near their mobile network, such as the presence of smoke from a forest fire;
More importantly, the technology could also provide life-saving communications between emergency personnel....
(((Networked cars – the search-engine web-crawlers of the Geospatial Web.
You just have them map the world as they swarm around, and presto, street-maps auto-update and traffic jams are a thing of the past.)))
