Vehicular networking for safety and infotainment services: An heterogeneous approach to Intelligent Transport Systems

In the recent years, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have been getting more and more integrated in the everyday commuter experience. Besides this trend, technology in this area is evolving very slowly and it is sometimes outdated. Vehicular ad-hoc Networks (VANET) have been emerging as a more and more useful technology, able to provide significant support to ITS, although they are in a preliminary stage, yet. VANETs allow the possibility to communicate from a vehicle to another vehicle (V2V, Vehicle to Vehicle) and from any Vehicle to the Infrastructure (V2I), thus leading to a naturally suited architecture for geo-localised communication, which well adapts to ITS. In this thesis, VANETs are applied to ITS in a unique and distributed approach that involves all the communication layers and investigates to what extent ITS can be improved by using innovative technologies used in combination with existing networking technologies like 3G or LTE in an heterogeneous approach. The philosophy behind this work is to explore and innovate Vehicular Networking in every aspect, thus leading to an all-round approach. This thesis, in facts, investigates the application layer, the routing layer and it proposes new real world heterogeneous and VANET experiments. At the application layer, the author explains the creation of a safety and control application to perform real-time vehicular traffic monitoring; the application layer is completed by another application related to infotainment and service channels, to share real-time videos in car incident scenarios or road condition monitoring scenarios. Below the application layer, this thesis proposes new VANET routing protocols to increase efficiency and throughput according to different approaches; how the information travels from sensors in a car to the network is also investigated. Finally the author has realised several real world experiments and heterogeneous applications that use the knowledge and the proposed innovations acquired from the Intelligent Transportation systems exploration and put them into practice. The all-round approach of this work, in facts, totally embraces ITS and such vision represents a complete approach aimed at showing how and where it is possible to improve ITS, from innovative theory to experimental practice.