[Tccc] IEEE Network Special Issue on "Advances in Vehicular Communications Networks"]

IEEE Network Special Issue on
"Advances in Vehicular Communications Networks"

Background
Vehicular communications are being applied to improve safety, decrease
fuel consumption, and increase the capacity of existing roadways. Both
vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications are used
to implement a number of promising applications such as local hazard
warning, efficient route planning and coordination of traffic flows.
Even truly cooperative and, therefore, extremely challenging
applications like cross traffic collision avoidance are being
considered.

In the last years a number of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS)
related projects and initiatives have been carried out (or will be
completed soon). In Europe, for example, the European Commission
initiated the eSafety Program to reduce the road fatalities by 50%
before 2010 and to improve traffic efficiency. These R&D projects have
created a solid technical basis for vehicular communications, and some
of them have also performed some preliminary experiences, from what some
important results have been obtained ("lessons learned"), as for example
the Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) in the US as well as
several projects in Europe.

All the aforementioned research efforts and initiatives can be
considered as the 'phase 1' in the development of vehicular
communications networks. This phase represents an initial and very
important step towards the goals of improving road safety and traffic
efficiency, and providing Internet services to the vehicles. Important
achievements, architectural decisions and conclusions have been the
outcome of this 'phase 1', such as the development of wireless physical
and MAC protocols suited for the vehicular environment (e.g. IEEE
802.11p), new network architectures (some of them not based on classical
TCP/IP), etc.

We are now witnessing the 'phase 2' of research and development in
vehicular communications networks, a new phase in which standardization
and field trials will play a key role, as well as the refinement and
extension of the network architectures and protocols defined in the
'phase 1'.

Scope and Contributions
The goal of this special issue is to share the research developments and
efforts of this new phase ('phase 2') in the vehicular communications
area. Paper submissions are invited on the following topics:

* Overview of state-of-the-art for vehicular communication
technologies and open challenges.
* Network protocols for cooperative vehicular communications, such as
geonetworking (geographical routing and addressing).
* Networking aspects for use of 2G/3G cellular systems for vehicular
communications.
* New system architectures enabling the provision of safety, traffic
efficiency and infotainment services in vehicular scenarios.
* Security, location privacy and reliability issues.
* Integration of IP protocols into the vehicular scenario.
* Standardization for vehicular communications worldwide,
interoperability and harmonization issues.
* Field operational tests (FOTs) for cooperative systems employing
vehicular communications networks.
* Regulatory aspects.

Submission
Articles should be tutorial in nature and should be written in a style
comprehensible to readers outside the speciality of the article.
Prospective authors must prepare their article in accordance with the
IEEE Network guidelines to authors, see
http://www.comsoc.org/livepubs/ni/info/authors.html. Authors should
submit their manuscript to the guest editors according to the schedule
below (authors are encouraged to notify at least 15 days before
deadline, their intention to submit a paper indicating title, abstract,
authors and keywords).

All submissions will be reviewed based on technical merit and
relevance.

Schedule for Submission
Manuscript submission: July 15, 2009
Acceptance notification: September 15, 2009
Final manuscript due: November 1, 2009
Publication date: January 2010

Guest Editors
Dr. Carlos J. Bernardos (corresponding editor)
Associate Professor, Department of Telematics Engineering
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Leganes, Spain
cjbc@it.uc3m.es

Dr. Andreas Festag
NEC Europe Ltd. - NEC Laboratories Europe
Network Research Division
Heidelberg, Germany
festag@nw.neclab.eu

Dr. Nicholas F. Maxemchuk
Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering
Columbia University
New York, USA
and
Chief Researcher
IMDEA Networks
Madrid, Spain
nick@ee.columbia.edu

Dr. Carolina Pinart Gilberga
Telefónica I+D
Head of the Networked Vehicles Division
Madrid, Spain
cpg@tid.es

Dr. Christian Weiß
Daimler AG
Group Research and Advanced Engineering
Manager Vehicle-Centric Communication
Sindelfingen, Germany
Christian.A.Weiss@daimler.com

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Carlos Jesús Bernardos Cano http://www.netcoms.net
GPG FP: D29B 0A6A 639A A561 93CA 4D55 35DC BA4D D170 4F67
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IEEE Network Special Issue on
Advances in Vehicular Communications Networks
http://www.comsoc.org/livepubs/ni/info/cfp/cfpnetwork0110.htm
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*Pietro Manzoni* http://www.disca.upv.es/pmanzoni