Base technologies for vehicular networking applications: review and case studies

In this paper, we review the state of the art of two key hardware technologies that support vehicular applications: on-board embedded systems and wireless sensor networks (WSN). We focus on pre-competitive or state-of-the-art hardware, and illustrate its use with two case studies: on-line navigation assistance and data collection in a mobile WSN. In the first case (based on a joint collaboration within project FUNCMOV PGIDIT05TIC00501CT, Xunta de Galicia, Spain), we describe our development experience with automotive embedded systems. In the second case, we analyze the feasibility of wake-up schema to gather data from highly dispersed sensor nodes. The goal of the paper is to offer a perspective on the current possibilities of these hardware systems.