Emerging Networks

What are your thoughts on VANETs?

Vehicular ad hoc networks emerge as an active area of development, research and standardization. It has an active potential for improvement of vehicle and road safety, convenience and traffic efficiency as well as addition of comfort to passengers and drivers. This technology comes with numerous benefits that can hardly be ignored.  Despite notable concerns, VANET is a potential productivity tool. Some of the benefits that can be derived include; provision of faster route to work through integration of GPS and navigation, turning traffic jam into work time and allowing VoIP services such as Skype and Google Talk between employees as well as reducing costs incurred in communication. VANET is a phenomenon technology since it also has future applications that can be exploited such as cruise control and initiating automatic adjustments for keeping safe distance between two vehicles.

What are the Implementation Issues?

Routing protocols is one the concerns raised as far as implementation of this technology is concerned. The routing protocols employs have been found to be inadequate to effectively and efficiently manage unique vehicular environment working as intermediate nodes hence it becomes impossible to establish connection between destination and sources. Therefore, this becomes a major issue that has to be dealt with before implementation.

What are the Security challenges?

Numerous VANET security challenges have to be addresses in areas pertaining to driver confidentiality, authenticity and availability. Threats to authenticity, availability and confidentiality are a major challenge as far as the security of the whole application is concerned. Notable threats to availability include; malware, denial of service attack, broadcast tampering, black hole attack and spamming. On the same note challenging threats to authenticity include; replay attack, Sybil attack, masquerading, message tampering, key replication and global positioning system proofing.

What is the current stage of the technology in terms of adoption and applications?

Recent times have featured trials and deployment of VANET in United States, Japan and European Union. Substantial efforts have been invested in experimentation with different aspects of VANET architecture and the trials are still underway. For instance, in 2006, EU enacted a safety program exclusively designed to mitigate road fatalities by fifty percent by 2010. In USA, Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) was started in 2004 and paved way for more trials. Therefore, VANET is still on trial stage in most countries and minimally applied in transport systems.