Wireless, Mesh & Ad Hoc Networks; Military Convoy Location and Situation Awareness

Vehicular ad-hoc networks have become an emergent research topic as vehicle-to-vehicle communications (V2V) offer some unique advantages. These advantages include a slow/stopped vehicle advisor capability (which advises the driver when any vehicle ahead is stopped or traveling slower than 20 mph), an emergency electronic brake light (which notifies the driver when a vehicle ahead is suddenly braking hard), a lane change and blind spot advisor, an intersection collision warning, and a forward collision avoidance capability with automatic braking. The intent is to use these emergent commercial applications for the military and to improve the communication between military vehicles in various tactical situations. This paper adds to this area of study with some new practical findings pertaining to vehicular networks, specifically convoy communications and unmanned vehicle control. Besides considering of principles and rules of military convoys, experiments and simulations with military scenarios are necessary to improve vehicular networking for the military use. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) tracing has become a key point in this field as we look at GPS traces and their effects on throughput improvement and reliability on vehicular communications. These issues were analyzed through experiments using the ORBIT testbed.