Vehicular Sensor Networks: Applications, Advances and Challenges

The recent years have witnessed tremendous growth in connected vehicles due to major interest in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) technology from both the research and industrial communities. VANET involves the generation of data from onboard sensors and its dissemination in other vehicles via vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, thus resulting in numerous applications such as steep-curve warnings. However, to increase the scope of applications, VANET has to integrate various technologies including sensor networks, which results in a new paradigm commonly referred to as vehicular sensor networks (VSN). Unlike traditional sensor networks, every node (vehicle) in VSN is equipped with various sensing (distance sensors, GPS, and cameras), storage, and communication capabilities, which can provide a wide range of applications including environmental surveillance and traffic monitoring. VSN has the potential to improve transportation technology and the transportation environment due to its unlimited power supply and resulting minimum energy constraints. However, VSN faces numerous challenges in terms of its design, implementation, network scalability, reliability, and deployment over large-scale networks, which need to be addressed before it is realized. This book comprises 12 outstanding research works related to vehicular sensor networks, addressing various aspects such as security, routing, SDN, and NDN.