Communications Protocol Design for 5G Vehicular Networks

The automotive industry is a challenging domain for the integration and evolution of heterogeneous Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Indeed, in order to provide drivers with a more pleasant and safer driving experience, vehicles are gradually endowed with sensing, actuation, computing, user-interaction and communications capabilities. Boosted by marketing and commercial competition, vehicles are thus becoming intelligent nodes capable of interconnecting, cooperating and even autonomously adapting to the surrounding environment. Since drivers usually spend a non-negligible fraction of time in vehicles and their behaviour may have a strong impact at a collective scale (e.g. pollution and noise in a city), the adoption of advanced ICT approaches for achieving a more safe, green and effective mobility management is still an open research issue. Moreover, the familiarity with the social networking paradigm makes people used to share information on-line with (in)direct contacts and use it in their everyday life depending on the degree of trust. It is worth noticing that this vision inherently deals with multimedia information, as it aggregates, process and disseminates sensed data (originating both on board and on the road side) integrated with warning/alarms, navigation suggestions, and context details that come from a specific area or even the Internet.