Bridging vehicle sensor networks with social networks: Applications and challenges

More and more serious global warming boosters the research on environmental protection from both the industries and academia. The collection of environmental data is a basic block for the environmental protection. Due to the mobility and the release of stringent power constraints, vehicular sensor networks (VSN) provides an efficient way to collect environmental data. However, many existing work on the application of VSN in the environmental protection focuses on using the collected data to generate the environmental report. The increasing popularity of social networks motivates our interests in providing more innovative applications by integrating the VSN with social networks. In this paper, we introduce the structure of the integrated system, discuss the applications and the challenging issues.