Applications of vehicular communications for reducing fuel consumption and CO2 emission: the state of the art and research challenges

Environmental problems, such as pollution, become more serious year after year. One of the major causes is high fossil fuel consumption with CO2 emission. In 2009, 23 percent of CO₂ emission globally came from land transportation systems, which is equal to 7000 million tons of CO₂. This large amount of gas pollution should be reduced to slow down global environmental problems. Reduction of fuel consumption and CO₂ emission in land transportation systems, which will have immediate positive economical and environmental impact, has become an important part of green technologies to alleviate global warming due to human activity. Intelligent transportation systems, which aim to use information and communication technology in the transportation systems, are considered to be a major enabler for the future green ITS. This article aims to provide a survey of the latest published applications based on vehicular communications as well as the envisaged technical challenges in this research area.