AVANET Services, Autonomous Vehicles and the Mobile Cloud

As vehicles will soon become network connected, new vehicle applications are emerging, from navigation safety to location aware content distribution, urban surveillance and intelligent transport. Autonomous vehicles stand out as important players, with plenty of sensors, memory and processing power. The richness of on-board resources and the diversity of applications set the Vehicular ad Hoc Network(VANET) apart from conventional MANETs and introduce new challenges in the services they provide. First, it becomes apparent that safe navigation in a future with autonomous car platoons, say, will demand efficient, low latency V2V. Moreover, other applications (eg, surveillance, traffic management, etc) will require a degree of coordination not possible with the conventional Internet Cloud. To this end, low latency cooperation can be best supported by a Mobile Computing Cloud (MCC), where vehicles use V2V to propagate computation results, share resources and provide mobile services. This talk will revisit VANET applications and will propose a Vehicular Cloud platform along with representative mobile service examples.