On the design and run of VANET road experiments

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are an emerging area of communication that offer a wide variety of possible applications, ranging from safety to multimedia and games. In a near future, in fact, we may easily envision safety and gaming applications where the real-time video captured from a vehicle is streamed to all connected ones, within some given range. We can therefore expect that the standardization of inter-vehicular communication protocols will support the emergence of such type of new applications and that multimedia and gaming, putting to good use such technologies, will rapidly grow. However, one of the obstacles to the exploitation of such applications in the context of VANETs is given by the practical impossibility to test those solutions in real life conditions, as a great number of vehicles are required to gather any significant amount of relevant experimental data. Hence, we here present an approach that makes the practicality of field tests come true, applying a novel methodology apt to experiment with multimedia applications and games in vehicular environments, as it can cope with a very limited amount of resources. The results gained by applying this approach represent a solid leapfrog in the study of such systems. We here discuss in detail the experiments that were run on the road with such methodology and the positive implications that such results reveal for the context of VANET-based multimedia and gaming.