KeyMG

New vehicle applications have recently emerged, ranging from navigation safety to location aware content distribution and intelligent transport. These applications require efficient communications support. For example in a world of autonomous vehicles, V2V communications will be essential for stable cruise control and platooning. Vehicles will provide services to fellow drivers (e.g., congestion or spectrum crowd sourcing) as well as to external customers. An example of the latter is urban sensing. Vehicles have become rich sensor platforms. They can monitor the environment and classify events, e.g., license plates, chemical readings, etc. They generate metadata that can be used to resolve Insurance claims after minor road accidents or even assist Law Enforcement Agents in the forensic investigation of crimes. The Service notion suggests that the VANET can be viewed as a Mobile Computing Cloud (MCC) where vehicles interact and collaborate to provide Mobile Services not available from the Internet Cloud. This vision is corroborated by two emerging realities: the vehicles pick up too much multimedia information from the environment to possibly upload it all to the Internet Cloud. Moreover, time sensitive safety applications require the data to be processed locally in the vehicles. In this talk we revisit VANET applications and services and propose a Mobile Cloud vehicle services platform. We then discuss a specific example based on content creation, search and dissemination. We conclude by making the case for a uniform services platform that can support a broad range of vendors and applications.