Fast prototyping for VANET applications with PDAs

Today Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETS) are a promising field for increasing comfort and safety on the road. They have the potential to connect cars with each other and thereby extract information about road conditions or dangers that drivers can't “see”, e.g., the end of a traffic jam behind a curve. In this article we will focus on the practical aspects of VANETs and provide an elegant and simple way to build application prototypes with the help of PDAs equipped with GPS and IEEE 802.11 wireless radio. So far, most research focused on communication aspects of VANETs. We will address the issue of how VANET applications can be implemented quickly as prototypes and propose an architecture for implementation including an interface to navigation software. The main advantage is that we can evaluate user acceptance with our approach additionally. We will show advantages and evaluation by implementing a small demo application that can be extended and be used in the future for further evaluation of protocols and complete applications covering the entire system including the user behavior.