| Abstract: | 研究期間：10208~10307;The advancement of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) has brought us a more convenient and safer commute environment. To enable various ITS applications, the communications among vehicles, road infrastructure, and traffic control center are crucial. Many wireless technologies have been developed to aid such communications in ITS applications, such as DSRC, IEEE 802.11p, and Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). However, compared with direct communications between vehicles (i.e., Inter-Vehicle Communications) in VANETs, little attention has been paid to the communications between vehicles and roadside units. While some pioneer projects in Europe and Japan have been building infrastructure along roads for communications between vehicles and roadside units, the construction for such infrastructure is usually costly and time-consuming. Recently, a few research publications have pointed out the possibility of using WiFi (i.e., IEEE 802.11 b/g/n) access points within the proximity of vehicles instead of pre-deployed propriety roadside units for communications. This approach has several advantages for us in Taiwan. First, Taiwan has a high percentage of population concentrated in urban area, where ITS applications really matter. The availability of WiFi access points in such area is high. Second, some prior projects that aim at improving Internet coverage, such as the WiFly project in Taipei, have already deployed a large number of WiFi access points on the road. These WiFi access points can be integrated as part of VANETs. Nevertheless, due to the dynamic nature of vehicles and complications of urban environment, there are still issues to be resolved before a reliable and secure communications between vehicles and WiFi access points can be realized. To be specific, we propose the following three primary tasks in this three-year research project: 1. The optimization of medium access control between vehicles and WiFi access points 2. Quick soft handoff between vehicles and WiFi access points 3. Efficient session key generation and distribution between vehicles and WiFi access points. The success of this project can not only provide a solid foundation for the development of VANET applications but also enhance significantly the personal privacy in the communications of VANET applications, which can potentially stimulate the economy of our country. In addition, students involving in this project can also learn how to put the theoretical work in probability theory and stochastic process into the practical network protocol design and implementation. |
